Re: Educational purpose

On  2015-Apr-09, at 13:15, Renato Iannella <ri@semanticidentity.com> wrote:

>
>> On 7 Apr 2015, at 11:02 pm, Mo McRoberts <mo.mcroberts@bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> Interjecting briefly: the issue with all of these is that they’re really
>> poorly-defined, legally-speaking, and even when one can arrive at a
>> definition, the definition varies quite significantly by jurisdiction, so
>> it’s really difficult to specify what ‘educational use’ means.
>
> True - and it is not *our* role to provide legally-binding contractual terms per jurisdiction ;-)
> Communities-of-use will provide that level of assurance (together with their local jurisdiction-based laws).

I agree - however, as the recent review of the actions has shown, it is quite important for the terms to match legal definitions, and that’s really difficult where nobody can agree upon what a legal definition actually is.

For example, there is a specific definition of educational institutions which is used in the specification of exceptions to copyright law (sometimes with blanket licensing schemes, sometimes not). These definitions, although quite broad, don’t necessary align with “educational use”, and certainly aren’t completely aligned across the EU, let alone the rest of the world.

In many cases, the definition one might need to express is defined by rights agreements, and is a lot more specific than a generic term like this — and it’s even easier if there’s a blanket licensing scheme which users must be a member of to qualify (at which point, you just need to agree a URI for the *scheme*, and define an Offer which is available to members of the group whose URI is that scheme).

For example, in the UK section 35[1] of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 states that it’s not infringement of copyright for educational institutions to retain and present broadcast programmes for educational purposes of that establishment, either on-premises or via a secure network. It also states that if a licensing scheme exists which covers these uses, then it’s only a valid exception if the institution is participating in the scheme. Such a scheme, unsurprisingly, does exist[2].

Given that, I can use ODRL to state that the programme is available to members of that scheme, and reflect the uses permitted by law. If there were other comparable schemes across the EU, I could put that data in too (as they’re essentially distinct offers).

However, what I probably wouldn’t bother doing is defining what "the educational purposes of that establishment” actually are - because in that situation it can be suitably inferred (at least to the point of satisfying most sensible lawyers) from the definition of the establishments in the first place, which is defined in the Act[3], but actually just references such exciting pieces of literature as the Education Act 1996[4].

It is certainly true that one can state “for educational use” (or even “for educational non-commercial use”) and be reasonably confident that many people would interpret that consistently with your intentions. The problems lie in the lack of overlaps in that particular venn diagram; because it’s poorly-specified, there will inevitably be disagreements over the definition if the assets are sufficiently popular, and this is compounded significantly where the offer crosses national borders. As things stand, people can’t even agree on whether having banner ads to help pay hosting costs violates the term “non-commercial”, and I can’t help but think that “educational use” is much, much more difficult to pin down.

Given that, I’d be really wary of *ODRL* defining a term representing either of these, unless we define it in a very particular way and make it clear that other people are welcome to define alternative terms which meet their own needs and use those instead. Personally, I’d *just* do that latter part, and steer well clear of getting embroiled in the specifics.

This approach also has the advantage of promoting extensibility over sheer openness; historically a number of vocabularies ended up being “forked” as a means to extensibility even when the forked version was substantially identical to the (still-evolving) original - large standards bodies being particularly bad offenders in this realm — which does kind of serve to defeat the purpose of namespace-driven extensibility somewhat. Taking this tack allows domain-expert pockets of the community to reach non-conflicting consensus and ODRL itself can just document these various extensions (so, best of both worlds).

The upshot being that if Europeana wants to define what “educational use” might mean as far as they’re concerned, then other people might adopt that, or they might not, and ODRL can just point to it (indeed, a wiki page listing various ODRL-extension vocabs over time would be quite nice). Of course, some of these may also be collected together into identifiable profiles, but need not necessarily be.

M.

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/35

[2] http://www.era.org.uk

[3] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/174

[4] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/56/section/4

--
Mo McRoberts - Chief Technical Architect - Archives & Digital Public Space,
Zone 2.12, BBC Scotland, 40 Pacific Quay, Glasgow G51 1DA.

Inside the BBC? My movements this week: http://neva.li/where-is-mo








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Received on Friday, 10 April 2015 11:09:09 UTC