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Studying the Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy Education

(November 9, 2007) - Media literacy education uses films, TV shows, advertisements, and other segments of popular culture to teach students about how to understand media and deconstruct its messages. But misunderstandings about copyright law, and overly zealous, sometimes threatening statements by the major media corporations, are hobbling the ability of media literacy educators to do their job.

In response, the Media Education Lab at Temple University, the Center for Social Media at American University, and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University's Washington College of Law are conducting a research project to clarify fair use in media education. Fair use is the crucial "free expression safety valve" in our law that allows reproduction of part—or sometimes all—of a copyright-protected work without the author's or publisher's permission for such purposes as commentary, criticism, and education.

The Media Education Lab's "Backgrounder on Copyright Confusion" explains: "Misleading FBI warning labels and other fear-inducing language is getting worse as mediamaking becomes more ubiquitous and as media use in classrooms becomes ever more common. At the same time, concern over running afoul of extended copyright protections severely constrict our educational mission and our expressive ability when it comes to issues concerning mass media and popular culture."

The Center for Social Media has already published a preliminary report, "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy," which outlines the problem. Although fair use is a broad, evolving concept with uncertain boundaries, educators often want certainty. So, as the report explains, a Consortium of College and University Media Centers (CCUMC) "produced a highly restrictive set of guidelines for educational multimedia production, which were endorsed by the publishing, movie, and record industries." Federal officials in the Copyright and Patent Office endorsed the guidelines in 1996.

This does not, however, give the guidelines the force of law, the report notes, "especially since they do not represent a consensus of educators’ views. In fact, the CCUMC 'Proposal for Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia'—also now found on numerous websites directed at teachers—were squarely rejected by the major national library associations, the National Association of State University and Land Grant Colleges, and a K-12 coalition led by the National School Boards Association."

The report goes on: "Educational fair use is at the heart of U.S. copyright doctrine. Too often, however, fair use guidelines are taken as exhausting the universe of possibilities, rather than describing a small bunker on a much larger landscape. In particular, the CCUMC guidelines enjoy credibility to which they are not entitled. Today, more than ever, educators need to know about the full range of reasonable fair uses available to them and their students."

The report includes a few illustrative examples:

• George Abell’s high school students analyze persuasion techniques used in advertising. But they don’t analyze real ads—Abell is too afraid he might run afoul of copyright restrictions. Instead, he spends time in the summer creating dummy ads for them to analyze. They’re not as good, as interesting, or as persuasive. But he’s confident he’s within the school’s guidelines.

• Cheryl Jenkowski-Knowles’s students create and analyze art by inserting themselves into portraits from European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painters. The original project, suggested by a student, was to use album-cover art, but Jenkowski-Knowles wants to stay clear of any question of using copyrighted materials.

• In Kwame Nelson’s social studies classes, students make mashups that draw from popular music and the latest political news, as audiovisual op-eds about current affairs. But they don’t show them on the school’s closed-circuit TV system. It might be a copyright violation.

Eventually, the researchers hope to facilitate the creation of a set of "best practices" in fair use for media educators, analogous to the "Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use" which the Center for Social Media spearheaded a few years ago. That document, produced after an extensive survey of the ways in which aggressive copyright-control policies were restricting documentary film production, has already been accepted by major film festivals and enhanced understanding of fair use in the film world.

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Click here for the "Backgrounder on Copyright Confusion" from the Media Lab at Temple University.

Click here to read the preliminary report, "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy." See also the Center for Social Media's "Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use."

On the problem of fair use guidelines, see FEPP's Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control; and on the nature and importance of media literacy education, see FEPP's Media Literacy: An Alternative to Censorship.