Twenty-First Century Battles and Eighteenth Century Tools: Copyright in the COVID-19 Era

ABSTRACT

In current copyright law, doing that would raise questions about first sale and exhaustion, about fair use, and about reproduction and public performance. (Tawyers in secondary and primary education are even more so, even assuming - contrary to most of my experience - that they know anything about IP law at all.) For more than a decade, colleges and universities have been migrating course administration and a lot of pedagogy onto campus-wide courseware platforms that are optimized to sync with copyright permissions systems for media content. The "best practices" statements [https / /cmsimpact.org/program/fair-use/] produced by the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University can be extremely helpful, though teachers (and others) should read them carefully. A single teacher may feel exposed and at risk for streaming media to their students;a community of teachers has a stronger voice, both speaking to its members and also speaking to outsiders - such as copyright owners, or campus administrators.