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Copyright

 

Canadian law states that any screening of a film or videotape to a group of people, unrelated by blood or marriage is considered public performance and a public performance license is required. Currently, the only exemption for educational use is the allowance of off air taping of news programs and news commentary programs for classroom use, provided that the off-air copy be destroyed within a year from the date of broadcast.

The University of Waterloo has established a Copyright FAQ to help faculty, staff and students better understand some of the copyright issues we face.

The staff of ITMS can be held liable in cases where copyright is violated therefore we must ascertain the copyright status of all materials.

As well, ITMS has its own Production Copyright Agreement for programs and videos produced by the Production Studio in ITMS. Contact Scott Charles at x36784, Dianne Naughton for information regarding this production copyright policy.

Copyright Resources & Links

The following links are intended as guidelines to help better understand copyright in the educational environment.

1. The Canadian Library Association Copyright page.

2. The Canadian Copyright Act

 

Copyright Considerations

Here are some copyright considerations to take into account when considering commercial and/or publicly available material for course content:

  1. Obtaining copyright permission to use video for a course can be a lengthy and sometimes complicated process. Cheryl Petrie in Media Loans & Licensing, x84070 is the contact person who can help you in pursuing copyright clearance.

  2. Some instructors would like to put copyrighted video content on their course websites. This creates a difficult situation for media staff because the act of transferring the analog video to digital is illegal without permission from the copyright holder.

  3. Many of the videos you find on sites like YouTube have not necessarily been placed there with the permission of the actual copyright owner. Linking to YouTube can be acceptable but downloading an illegal video and placing it on your website is illegal even though you were not the person who originally digitized the video.

  4. Our clients often assume it is not illegal to use video for educational purposes. Time and technical resources prohibit most instructors from putting videos on the web themselves. So the expectation is that because our Production Staff have the technology, we can upload the video content without question. 

  5. If someone purchases a video, containing copyrighted material, they do not own the copyright. It is illegal to transfer that material to a different format even if the one they purchased has broken or is out of date. Educational purchases are for the life of the format and do not include duplications rights unless those rights have been specifically negotiated at the time of purchase.