Online Cheating Changes Teaching

Tutoring services, online study guides, and digital forums where students can request help on their homework abound, with some students posting copyrighted homework assignments on the sites, and some “tutors” supplying entire finished papers for users. In response, some faculty members are changing how they conduct their courses.

Some instructors expend added time to craft a fresh set of homework questions for each new semester of a course, or only allow students a quick look at their graded assignments before having them turn the work back in so it can’t be posted online. Others are altering their grading scales to give more weight to in-class exams rather than written papers, which leaves them fewer measurements for calculating a final grade.

While many student-support sites have policies and honor codes in place regarding copyrighted content and completion of students’ work for them, actual self-policing appears to be minimal or nonexistent. It’s up to faculty themselves to search out whether their copyrighted intellectual property has been posted illegally and then file a takedown request via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Could Watermark Provide DRM Solution?

Publishers can’t be blamed for trying to safeguard their assets with digital rights management protection on their e-titles, particularly against large-scale file sharing.

The problem is DRM does not really deter anyone determined to share files, which led Dana Robinson, a adjunct professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law and partner with Techlaw LLP, to propose a solution in an article for Digital Book World. His solution would be to create e-books with a watermark place throughout the book.

The e-book’s buyer would have to provide personal information for the watermark by agreeing to terms and conditions that would prohibit the resale or distribution of the title.

“The point of making a watermark that shows the user’s personal information is to create a disincentive for the user to pass the book along to unknown third parties, deputizing the user to act as a gatekeeper, protecting the book from wrongful distribution,” Robinson wrote, adding that removing the watermark could then be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Robinson points out that his watermark solution would not prevent people from sharing their book with family or close friends, but that they’ve always done that with printed books. His watermark is aimed at individuals trying to gain financially from someone else’s work.

“What e-book publishers need is a way to distribute e-books with as little hassle as possible, while ensuring that the publisher can sue pirates and stop e-book sales, rental, and large-scale sharing,” he said.

Library of Congress receives 20 suggested exemptions to the DMCA

In October, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress announced the start of their year long review process to consider exemptions to The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As a reminder, the DMCA was passed in 1998 and prohibits the circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted material. Since then, the exemption review period has occurred every three years with the most recent review in 2006. In order for exemptions to be considered, petitioners must prove that they are or likely to be, “adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention.” Since the announcement in October, the Library of Congress has received 20 suggested exemptions. Several were submitted by universities and academic associations including: University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, University of California at Berkeley, Temple University, and the Library Copyright Alliance and Music Library Association. As noted in a recent article from Inside Higher Education, the exemption proposal of most interest to higher education is one submitted by Peter Decherney from the University of Pennsylvania along with other film studies scholars, which builds on the exemption that they submitted and won in 2006. The proposal asks that the exemption which allows film studies professors to reproduce clips from DVDs be changed to allow film studies students to use the material as well and allow for the use of audiovisual material in any university library, not just the film studies department library. The authors explain that the law is affecting students’ ability to progress in the discipline just as media studies professors were previously affected. The other proposals submitted by universities and academic associations ask to expand the exemption to include K-12 teachers and professors in all disciplines.

The DMCA turns 10

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the passing of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In commemoration of the event, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a new report titled, “Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA”. DMCA has not always been well received by higher education, and as the EFF notes in their report, there have been a number of specific instances where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was not used against copyright pirates but instead against legitimate activities conducted by consumers, scientists, and businesses. Over the years, EFF has fought against many DCMA suits in the name of free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights. However, a posting on the Wired Blog provides a different perspective on the DCMA saying that it is often misunderstood and although it has caused problems and abuses, the internet would not be where it is today if it were not for the law. The posting notes,

“Blogs, search engines, e-commerce sites, video, and social-networking portals are thriving today thanks in large part to the notice-and-takedown regime ushered in by the much-maligned copyright overhaul.”

The posting goes on to say that even Google which also owns You Tube credits the DMCA for its success.

In the future, Congress could reopen the DMCA which will create an opportunity for reform but also an opportunity for the MPAA and RIAA to influence the law. We have already seen instances where the RIAA has influenced recent legislation, such as the reauthorization of the higher education act, which will now require institutions to perform some of the policing function for content providers that they have previously avoided. A reopening of the DMCA could have significant implications for DRM, and digital course materials. This presents both opportunities and challenges for the college store community, as well as much of the rest of higher education related to digital content and intellectual property.

Information on the basics of the DMCA, as well as links to the DMCA itself, are available through the UCLA Online Institute for Cyberspace Law and Policy, as well as other sources.