Rights Issues - First Expert Workshop (WS 6.1)

The agenda for all expert workshops is settled on the basis of input from network members. An initial list of issues to give priority was established in the first strategic seminar. This list has been commented on and revised during the first year – most notably on preceding workshops. Focus points for the first workshop on rights issues in Ljubljana, March 4th-5th 2008 were:

• Providing guidelines for users/teachers/producers
• Creative Commons
• Rights clearance practices
• Strategies for providing copyright cleared material for education
• Protection of rights: Digital Rights Management

The first two issues were given the highest priority by members and were thus most prominent on the agenda for this first workshop.

From the presentations and discussions during the workshop, it is clear that there are still a number of barriers to overcome when it comes to dealing with rights issues in relation to educational repositories.

Many of these have to do with providing clear guidance to teachers – both when sharing their own content and reusing others. Group sessions on how, when and in what situations such guidance should be provided, revealed that a number of initiatives exist already but also that they tend to be either i) related to a specific project rather than for example general teacher training modules, or ii) focused on only a (minor) subset of the problems relating to sharing and remixing content.

Successful initiatives like for example Creative Commons are dealing with some of the issues in relation to especially teacher produced material but do by far solve all problems. Even though Open Educational Resources seem to be flourishing there are a number of issues relating to mixing content under different licenses – but there seems to be a consolidation around a few licensing schemes also in this case.

Workshop participants agreed to complete surveys/filling in template documents describing best practices in order to establish a more coherent overview of the current situation within European repositories and aid the production of guidelines to other repository owners.

16 of 23 founding members were represented. In addition three associated members participated – giving a total of 33 participants.

Also, two invited external experts took part in the session on Tuesday afternoon: Maja Bogataj Jančič, IPI -Intellectual Property Institute, Slovenia and Maja Lubarda, Creative Commons Slovenia

Welcome and reporting from expert workshop 4.1
The workshop started with a brief introduction of how the agenda came about - mentioning both input from the strategic seminar in Naples and the input from the preceding expert workshops. The theme of rights issues interconnects closely with both some of the user interface discussion from the first workshop on engaging users and (defining and) implementing relevant standards for expressing (machine-readable) usage rights using DRM languages.

The two main themes of this workshop: Creative Commons and Providing guidelines for users/teachers/producers were introduced, along with the idea to produce a first draft input for the relevant chapters of a thematic synthesis report on rights issues.

New participants were briefly introduced to the Members Zone - especially the tools and functionalities that were to be used during this workshop.

New associate Member – SLO (The Netherlands)
Loes Stadhouders presented SLO, the Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development, and how they expect to contribute to and benefit from the EdReNe network. The presentation introduced their work on curriculum development, with a focus on how to efficiently support the process of choosing new learning resources and keeping track of the latest developments. The current status and future plans for the repository www.leermiddelenplein.nl was presented and discussed by members.

Relevant links:

• Download presentation
• SLO website (international section)

Digital Technology and Legal Challenges to Copyright
Maja Bogataj Jančič (IPI -Intellectual Property Institute, Slovenia) set the stage for discussing rights issues by presenting the history of copyright law, and discussing the new challenges posed by digital technology. The new possibilities – or threats, depending on your view – posed by the internet and distribution of digital content were discussed in the context of reactions already seen by copyright organizations, authors/content creators, users and high-tech industries.
The presentation and subsequent discussion touched upon the possible future of copyright law – a redefinition is probably needed when seeing the current user behaviour of digital natives. But if a redefinition of rights and limitations will include more open licenses, what will be the new incentive to create?

Relevant links:

• Download presentation
• Watch streaming version of presentation online

Creative Commons License
Maja Lubarda (Creative Commons Slovenia) gave an introduction to the origins, status and future of Creative Commons and introduced the aspects of the various types of Open Content licenses. Building upon successes of open software, the open content licenses have seen an explosion in use during recent years, trying to provide some of the answers to the paradox that digital content enables sharing and remixing much easier than ever before, but at the same time is met with often more strict copyright regulations.

Relevant links:

• Download presentation
• Watch streaming version of presentation online
• Creative Commons
• CC Learn

Rights Management and Educational Repositories
Charles Duncan from Intrallect presented aspects of rights management relating to educational repositories. His presentation took participants through the phases of recognition, assertion, expression, dissemination, exposure and enforcement of rights and presented examples of how this can be accomplished in the context of repositories.

A starting point for repositories is to create a clear and concise digital rights management policy, supporting the goals the repository wishes to reach, and afterwards supplement this with the necessary infrastructure to efficiently disseminate and expose rights (licenses) in readable (or rather: usable at the point of discovery) ways to both humans and computers. The presentation holds links to suggested further reading and concrete examples of how licensing schemes are implemented in repositories.

Relevant links:

• Download presentation
• Watch streaming version of presentation online

Digital Rights Management in the educational sector
Paul Sire (sDAE) presented a model for digital management of rights, and what the implications and prerequisites for implementing digital management of rights within the educational sector would include. With an outset from the situation that new solutions are needed in a time where the amount of digital content is booming and the possibilities for reuse are also rapidly expanding, the presentation discussed the potential perspectives from both educators/content industry angles.

Relevant links:

• Download presentation
• Watch streaming version of presentation online

Take, Shape, Share - European Repository Project
Albert de Vos (TSS project manager) presented a concrete case of digital learning resource sharing across institutional (and national) borders, and did an online demonstration of searching for, creating and publishing content within the Take Shape Share repository.< br /> The project builds upon the big effort that British Colleges for Further Education and Secondary Schools have built over the past 16 years in the sharing of digital learning materials. This content is hosted in the FENC repository, which contains over 30,000 learning hours of content. It has a focus on providing easy to use authoring tools for teachers, and allowing sharing within a local, regional, national or international community.

Relevant links:

Examples on the use of licensing schemes
Trond Hanssen (utdanning.no) presented an example on how open content licenses can be integrated into repositories, and the strategy chosen to make it easy to choose the relevant license during the content authoring phase. The presentation was done primarily showing online examples from utdanning.no sites.

The subsequent discussion included questions on the best way of presenting different licenses for different pieces of content on the same page (typically pictures or other media files) – both whether included directly in the produced page or embedded. There seemed to be no consensus regarding best practise of this – but agreement that this was not always a simple task to present for end users.

Open educational resource community LeMill - Copyright Issues
Hans Põldoja (TLF) presented the approach taken to rights issues within the community platform LeMill, describing some of the interoperability issues that exist between different open content licensing schemes and the limitations they impose depending on repositories’ choice of licensing scheme. All resources created in LeMill are published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license (this does also allow media pieces to be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license; GNU Free Documentation License or Public Domain). The presentation also included some of the arguments against choosing a non-commercial version of the CC-licenses.

• Download presentation (or see a possibly updated version through SlideShare)

Group session 1 – Rights issues for repository owners
The first group session was primarily a common mindmapping session trying to establish the important points for repository owners to focus on and to develop policies.

• Relevant policies and initiatives
• Licensing schemes
• Digital Rights Management / Management of rights
• User interface issues
• Monitoring copyright infringements
• Risk Management Strategies for repository owners
• Developing guidelines to licensors

Following this initial idea generating session groups were asked to comment and elaborate on other groups’ work. The outcomes of this group session provides valuable input to the next workshop on rights issues and valuable focus points for the upcoming work on the Thematic Synthesis Report on Rights Issues (D6.3).

An interactive version of the draft mindmap produced during the first part of the group session, including notes, links etc. is available from the EdReNe Members Zone and can be further edited by all members.

• Online (not editable) version of draft rights issues mindmap.

Group session 2 – Providing guidelines for practitioners
This group session was dedicated to the gathering of best practise examples and issues related to how, where and when guidance should be provided to repository users – when using and/or depositing content. The intention was to avoid detailed discussions relating to different jurisdictions, and instead assume that repository owners (should be/) are aware of the relevant legal details and have to play a role in educating repository users.

A forum within the Members Zone was used for collecting viewpoints, ideas and examples. Initially each group was asked to focus on one of the following use cases for contributors/consumers of repository resources:

• Contributors: Work that includes data about pupils
• Contributors: Publishing student works
• Contributors: Work that includes pictures/video of pupils
• Contributors: Publishing music
• Contributors: Publishing art
• Contributors: Publishing pictures
• Consumers: Reusing content
• Consumers: Reusing content 2
• Consumers: Educating pupils
• Consumers: Publishing in other forums

Later in the session all groups were asked to comment/elaborate on the first set of issues and/or contribute with new relevant themes.

The content of the forum will form the basis of a set of recommendations to be further developed in the next workshop and included as part of the Thematic Synthesis Report on Rights Issues (D6.3).

As part of the discussion participants were asked to (where possible and relevant) include details on:

• When and where should this information be presented (for example before/during registration, printed materials, poster, only in repository context …)
• How should it be presented (text, screencast/video, reference work, ask-an-expert …)

In addition the discussion revealed a number of existing initiatives aimed at providing guidelines to practitioners – these will be further explored in the writing of the Thematic Synthesis Report. The collection of these initiatives is still open and expanding.

As most of the examples are not in English, the ambition is to continue the collection of good examples and establish this as a resource section on the EdReNe website, including English summaries of the approaches taken.

Group session 3 – Creative Commons: Ask the expert
Half an hour of the workshop was set aside for an informal Ask the Expert session on Creative Commons as issues relating to this particular licensing scheme are relevant for many of the network members. The legal lead of Creative Commons Sweden, Mathias Klang, gave a brief introduction to common misunderstandings and then answered questions from workshop participants.

Topics discussed included “mixing licenses”, retracting licenses, and example scenarios. Many of the issues discussed – at least those not directly related to repository implementation - are also answered through the FAQ section of the general Creative Commons web site.

The discussion also touched upon the special considerations site for the use of CC licenses in an educational context. A portal specifically targeting educators is under development by ccLearn.

Relevant links:

• CC Learn initiatives:
  • Universal Education Search
  • CC Portal for Educators (under construction – meanwhile confer e.g. the ccLearn FAQ with sections for students, instructors and administrators)

2^nd Strategic seminar planning and workshop evaluation
The workshop ended with a short (due to prolonged discussions following presentations only half an hour was available) informal evaluation session.

The general perception was that many new ideas had been exchanged, but that a more in-depth analysis of the issues brought about during the brainstorming/discussion sessions was needed in order to produce solid guidance on best practices for repository owners. Workshop participants agreed to provide (English) descriptions of the initiatives in their own countries before the next workshop on rights issues. Members were also willing to contribute to surveys on the current use of licensing schemes, rights policies and related matters in order to produce a more coherent picture of the European situation.

The mindmap produced during the brainstorming session could provide input for prioritizing the issues to be dealt with at the second strategic seminar in Lisbon, and thus help in determining next steps within the theme on rights issues.

Administrative issues
A short session devoted to project administrative issues - describing current status and answering questions relating to financial and/or other project related matters. Updated information related to project internal matters is available to network members from the Members Zone in the area General info.