DISTANCE LEARNING NEEDS COPYRIGHT RELIEF
Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) are
sponsoring a bill that would ease copyright restrictions on
content used as part of distance-education programs. The
Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH)
would allow educators to include film, music, and other media
clips in online courses without having to pay licensing fees,
an expense that has caused some distance-education programs to
restrict their Web-based offerings. At the University of
Maryland University College, for example, which has 70,000 online
students, educators had to pull a film course because acquiring
the necessary licenses for film clips would have taken too long
and cost too much. Gerard Heeger, president of the school, said
the present copyright restrictions are "an increasingly untenable
wedge between content in the classroom and at a remote location."
A lobbyist for the publishing industry warned that changes to the
current law could lead to increased piracy of copyrighted
materials. (Reuters, 13 March 2001)

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SENATE BILL WOULD EXTEND 'FAIR USE' CLAUSE TO ONLINE EDUCATION
A recently introduced Senate bill called the Technology Education
and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH) would let educators using
distance-learning materials in digital formats use various
copyrighted material without getting permission from the content
owner. The bill modernizes the Copyright Act of 1976 for the
digital age, updating the fair-use distance-education provisions
contained in the original legislation. TEACH would scrap the
current requirement that learning must take place in a physical
classroom and would ensure that the distance-learning exemption
covers the temporary copies that must be created in networked
file servers to transmit content over the Web. The bill would also
change the current regulations to enable educators to display to
students "limited" portions of "dramatic" literature, music,
audiovisual, and sound recordings, as well as the total versions
of non-dramatic literature and musical works.
(eSchool News Online, 19 March 2001)