With the move over to the new 7.3 server, I have been informed that the Blackbaord steering committee is proposing the following:

As you are aware, Blackboard is now governed by a university steering committee and there is a proposed policy to not allow video and audio in Blackboard courses and the content collection system. Instead these files must be put on the streaming server. Since that policy has not yet been passed, I will go ahead and “take the hit” for this one.

 This is from an email from Rob Owens regarding a course copy request recently. Upon inspection of the streaming media services website for ITS  this is the following on streaming media and copyright:

Federal copyright laws do apply to all media streamed from ITS servers. Individuals and departments streaming media from these servers will need to be the author or owner of the media copyright or have expressed written permission from the copyright holder to post the media for streaming. Content streamed from these servers is the responsibility of the individuals who place it on the server and the departments within whose space the media is placed. See UNCG’s Copyright and Fair Use guidelines and UNCG’S Copyright Ownership and Use Policy. For more information, see the University Counsel Web site.

 Examining the UNC Primer on Copyright Use it is clear that audio is not covered under section 108 of copyright exemption and therefore to be in compliance with copyright law, any recorded examples used in on-line courses must be cleared by the copyright holder before it can be placed on the ITS streaming server.

Therefore once the desicion is made to disallow the use of audio & video files directly in Bb, you will only be able to include personal performance recordings in your courses unless the recordings are now part of the public domain, which is highly unlikely.

If there is a copyright lawyer with “fair use” educational experience who would like to solve this situation I would love to hear from you.