Hi Everyone;
Excuse the whining here. I am actually very grateful for this module because for the past few years, I have been responsible for seeking copyright permission for a few large publication projects. Everything I know about copyright, I’ve had to learn on my own with very little assistance.
Oh, how I wish everything could be found on iStock! I have spent weeks searching for clinical images for specific medical or dental conditions. When I do find some appropriate images 75% of the time, they are owned by a monopoly organization called Elsevier. They charge a fortune and have ridiculous restrictions that don’t help at all in this age of open educational resources. My director recently published an article in a publication they owned. She had the option of making her article an open resource. However, there was a catch. She would have to pay the $4000 for the privilege. She was the author, she was making no money on the publication of her article, but if she wanted others to use it freely, she had to pay upfront. This is definitely not in the spirit of ‘Fair Dealing’.
The dilemma we regularly face is that we want to publish our courses on a website not managed by the University of Manitoba. Consequently, most ‘fair dealing’ privileges described by UBC do not apply to us. We have to get transactional consent to republish an image and this can be very tricky and very time consuming.
Reference:
UBC Copyright. Fair Dealing in Practice. Retrieved from http://copyright6.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2015/04/Fair-Dealing-in-Practice-v-1-0-2015.pdf
Hi Tanya,
I would agree with the frustrations on finding appropriate images for the content you’re developing. It seems that Elsevier, among other companies have a huge monopolies in their field for copyrighted stock images. Perhaps this could be an opportunity for a business? Like on Canva, designers charge $1 or $2 for the use of stock images within designs. It’d be cool to encrypt a photo that was used for digital content so that the photo wasn’t downloadable from the sites they were used on… or something like that 🙂
As for the issue with your director, John Willinsky (2002) has written about the issue of open-sourcing content and outlines the benefits to everyone who would access to it. Conversations would be enriched and the creative freedom to build on that content would be more accessible, among many other benefits. It’s really too bad that the publication model is all about making money and not focused on information and knowledge sharing. If you want to check out the article, see the reference here:
Willinsky, J. (2002). Education and Democracy: The Missing Link May Be Ours. Harvard Educational Review, 72(3), 367-392. Retrieved from https://pkp.sfu.ca/files/Democracy.pdf
Hi Victoria;
Thanks for your comments, and the link!
I am a real fan of open-source content – providing that proper attribution is given.
We are in the process of producing a large amount of open educational resources, and it is difficult to get permission to use images when we tell copyright holders that the image will be posted within a document on an open-source website. They want some guarantee about the number of people who will view it and for how many years. Those kinds of questions make no sense in a digital world. We don’t want to steal anything and we are more than happy to site the source of the creator/owner of the image, and pay a small fee, if necessary. However, the publication companies, like Elsevier, are still thinking in terms of hard-copy print where circulation numbers are finite. The world is changing and the old rules don’t make much sense. I hope they come up with new ones soon.
Kind regards,
Tanya
Hi Tanya,
What a frustrating experience! You’re right about the laws and rules not meeting the needs of the digital world; we fight that all the time in education! There seems to be an expectation that digital tools are used similarly as their predecessors were, so you get a lot of substitutive uses of technology in classrooms, instead of transformational uses. This is a very similar issue to thinking that rules that apply in the spaces of print or broadcast apply to digital media. Best of luck with your copyright issues, and good on you for developing OERs!
Victoria