Old licensing models pose problems in multimedia

2-3/2018 22.8.2018

Professor Rainer Oesch calls for new ways of licensing new kind of educational material.

In schools and universities traditional text books are nowadays often set aside and replaced by other kind of materials – not only web materials but also specially made combination packages of different content materials like texts, music and other audio materials, images, animations, videos and interactive contents like links. These packages can be set in a cloud service to be used by the students with their mobile devices.

As for acquiring rights for educational multimedia, the normal contracting principles of copyright law apply. Before contracting the producer usually must make a clearance about the material to be included in the multimedia. The material can be available in public domain for several reasons, e.g. time limits of protection, public documents etc. Exemptions (free use like citations) to copyright can apply, too. From a pragmatic point of view, however, we may ask if the regulatory framework promotes the licensing to make it easier for educational use. The detailed formulations of exemptions in the legislation make the task difficult. This can be explained by the narrow interpretation of exemptions. Nor is there any special one stop shop-licensing for the new media. But there are, for example, in the Finnish Copyright Act (from 1961 with several amendments) some regulations concerning so called extended collective licensing. The aim is to promote legal mass use. This form of licensing is possible on some sectors of productions only, for instance for photocopying, use in radio and tv-programs, transmission of tv-programs.

We also have one special rule in form of a mandatory license, on copyright clearance for use in works of compilation in education, meaning anthologies (Section 18 of the FinnCopAct).

Although the main rule on the freedom of making anthologies usable against remuneration seems to work beneficially for productions of multimedia for educational use, the exact wording and the narrow interpretation lead to the opposite. The rule does not apply to a work especially created for education. Therefore, this provision does not help much for using new multimedia products. in schools or universities.

In the case 2016/16, the Copyright Council stated that the use of six photographs and the texts connected to them was permissible as legal citations on the basis of the general citation rule and the specific rule for free use in critical and scientific presentations (Sections 22 and 25 in the Act).

In the future, if the rules on exemptions are interpreted fairly liberally in order to promote education and research and if the rules on the extended collective licensing are further developed towards a more general formulation (maybe a one-stop-shop), this development will be welcomed for the benefit of use of multimedia both in education and research.

Aiheet: Muut, Tekijänoikeus

Kirjoittajat

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