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Education Media Music

Legal Music Distribution for Education? 58

Posted by Cliff from the if-it-isn't-legal-it-should-be dept.
discstickers asks: "One of my classes next semester, 'Roots of Rock & Roll', has been canceled, because the professor isn't allowed to post the songs needed for the class, on a limited-access server ([which would] only be available to people registered for the class). So Slashdot, is there a legal way to get around this? The MP3s in question are old albums and individual songs. The cost shouldn't be too high, there are 100 people in the class with Macs and PCs, and we'd have to be able to burn the music to mix CDs for the final project."
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Legal Music Distribution for Education? More

Legal Music Distribution for Education?

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  • way back machine (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kayen_telva ( 676872 )
    how would this class have been taught in 1989 ? just do it that way.

  • Hmmmm...... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nagatzhul ( 158676 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @05:16PM (#7848465)
    Isn't allowed? Wouldn't this fall under fair use and education purposes, legally speaking? Haven't they been photocopying books and magazines for years under that clause?
    • Haven't they been photocopying books and magazines for years under that clause?

      Absolutely. This is because book and magazine publishers aren't the profiteering bunch of fuckmonkeys that the RIAA are. The RIAA says if you didn't purchase it, don't let us catch you listening to it or we swear to God we'll fucking kill you.

      A professor photocopying multiple textbooks in order to make a coursepack to hand out to his students == perfectly legal.

      A professor ripping multiple purchased CDs in order to make a C

      • Re:Hmmmm...... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        A professor photocopying multiple textbooks in order to make a coursepack to hand out to his students == perfectly legal

        No, it isn't, its just not enforced often. I have taken a lot of classes where we were told that there is a copy of a particualr textbook in the library on reserve and that we should view a particualr article there as it was the only article fro mthat textbook we were going to use, so there was no need to purchase the book, but it was not legal to photocopy it and hand it out in class.
        • The keyword was "multiple". As in the professor purchased an unusued copy of the textbook for every student in the class...

          Or so I assume. :)

    • People who do not know their rights, do not really have them.

      From Subject Matter and Scope of Copyright [loc.gov] page 24

      Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringement of copyrights:
      (i) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, ...

      Nonetheless we live in a society of copyright extremists. Plese mention the Eldred A [eldred.cc]

      • Not to mention that other parts of the fair use say that availability or lack thereof (could each student get a copy via itunes, etc.? instead?), mow much of a work is used (can you get by with 30 second snippets?), as well as dollar value of the stuff copied will weigh heavily on how a ruling would be made. And of course the educational use.

        IANAL, but I do work in educational technology. We've had instructors who have contacted publishers and gotten written permission to distribute some old software, tu

      • Yes, please. This seems like a clear-cut case of fair use, as long as the course takes reasonable measures to make sure that the songs don't find their way onto file sharing networks!

    • You are NOT legally allowed to copy the whole thing. You are legally allowed to copy a percentage of the artical under the fair use clause of most copyright acts (note we are international!). You are also allowed to seek permission from one of the copyright owners the right to copy a particular article. As with code there may be more than one, the original author or the magazine that the article was sold to.

      for more information on copyright law you might want to go to groklaw.net where PJ is talking abo
    • Find minor bands that illustrate the needed points who either post music free to the internet or sell music on the the internet or through small recording companies.

      Unlike the big names a school can easily negotiate with such groups and most of them will be delighted to help other people appreciate music and become musicians - because they've not forgotten what music is about..

      • What if one of "the needed points" is that attributes A, B, and C of the music and attributes D and E of the performance are correlated with how high a record climbed on the charts? In such a case, "minor bands that illustrate the needed points" don't exist because if "minor bands ... illustrate[d] the needed points", they wouldn't be "minor" anymore.

        • If that was the case Classical music could not be thought.

          If they are studying only the musical aspects (that is why they need the recordings) then any band that can play the music to a proficient enough level (most can, they are musicians after all) would be able to convey a close enough experience.

          In Classical music this is common day to day practice, whay it should not be the case with Rock and Roll?

          • If they are studying only the musical aspects

            Are you sure that this is in fact the case? In my mind, the study of rock music is unlike the study of classical music in that the study of rock music tends to encompass the study of a particular chart-topping recording as much as the study of the music itself.

  • You must buy a physical copy of each full CD that contains the song you want (since these are older songs, the singles are no longer available, so you'll have to just buy the whole thing). There must be a discrete copy of each CD/song/group of songs for each person in the class, including instructors and professors. So, figure 10 songs needed, 10 different full CDs to get the 1 song that you need, PER student.

    Students will NOT bring tape recorders to class to record the lecture in order to avoid possibly
    • I'm pretty sure that the professor can copy the songs all he wants for his personal use. He can't distribute those copies to the students in his class. Whether or not they already own their own copies is irrelevant.

      Second, there is nothing to prevent students from selling their CD's back at the end of the term, or lending the CD's to each other during the term. That's perfectly legal.

      Copyright isn't a license. It's a set of laws about who has the legal right to make and of distribute copies.
      • Its been awhile, but I remember a few stories on slashdot about the RIAA going after used CD stores. They wanted a percentage of the sale price for each CD. Naturally they would want a percentage of the money the students got back at the end of the term.

        Do these people even come from the same planet?!
  • If all the students signed something to delete the copyrighted works in question after the class was over, it would be fair use, since the purpose would be educational and non-profit. It's the same as if someone showed a movie during class.

    • Fair Use does not apply if the copyright holder is financially damaged by the event (the education/nonprofit nature of the copying activity is but one of the required tests). Ironically, the advent of legal per-song online music sales makes single-song distribution damaging to copyright holders -- students should buy the songs needed instead. Now if the professor made small excerpts of the relevant songs (for written materials the permissible excerpting is usually about 10-20%) then it might be OK. But a
    • If all the students signed something to delete the copyrighted works in question after the class was over, it would be fair use, since the purpose would be educational and non-profit. It's the same as if someone showed a movie during class.

      That's not quite the same as showing a movie in class. The original post talks about making the songs available from a server and also says it is a requirement to be able to burn the music to CD's for a final project. The equivalent using your movie analogy would be to

  • Drawing on my legal education, I think there may be a solution: take a real class instead.
  • Is this a university rule? Clarification, please. It might be legal to post those files as you described as a fair use (thus making your question pointless) and it might be a school rule (also making your question kinda pointless because we don't know your school).

  • There is a document (Score:2, Informative)

    by Apreche ( 239272 )
    There is a law which explicitly dictates the terms under which you may use copyrighted material for educational use. Find it and do what it says, and it is legal.
  • First off, why not have the professor contact Apple and ask for an educational discount?

    Second, have the professor post a list of the songs that he will be teaching for the semester. Chances are, some students might already have some of the songs on CD or whatever, esp. if they're taking the class because they like rock and roll!

    Third, have each student purchase the necessary songs from iTunes (with educational discount) for their own use.

    Seriously, as long as it's under 100 songs, there's no problem

  • I'm having a hard time understanding the difficulty. Libraries [unt.edu] around [mit.edu] the [uiuc.edu] country [uchicago.edu] can [columbia.edu] do [bowdoin.edu] it [princeton.edu], why can't yours?

  • Even if you work around this... (Score:4, Funny)

    by JMZero ( 449047 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @05:38PM (#7848664) Homepage
    ..the mean old Dean still won't let the prof enter the class in "Battle of the Bands". It's against school policy - and, besides, what hope does a ragtag bunch of school kids have of winning?
  • For every college course I took that required material other than my textbook, had a list that I had to take to the bookstore and buy. A typical lit class would require about 12-15 novels that I had to buy at the bookstore or at regular retail. Same applies here. Post a list of the songs that you need, your job to hit iTunes or buyMusic or your local used CD seller and purchase that music. Why should this be any different than it was with analog medium. If you don't the laws to treat digital media differen
  • .....The MP3s in question are old albums and individual songs. The cost shouldn't be too high, there are 100 people in the class with Macs and PCs.........

    With the fast CD writers available today, this [bestbuy.com] might do the job for you and might take less time than setting up the server, managing server security and authentication etc...

    But then again, don't break any copyright law!
  • If I understand the purpose of the class it's to teach about music, not how to be a music pirate. Why the need to teach how to distribute and/or burn "mix" CD's?

    Unless there are a bunch of rarities in the playlist, chances are that $10 at a used record shop will net all the originals. (Not those hokey remastered-on-CD things.) Most college-age kids would learn a lot about music by going to such a store.


  • The TEACH Act [google.com] is meant for situations just like yours. A bit of reading here [nea.org] or here [ncsu.edu] should get you going. It is by no means a smooth path, for instance I cannot copy the laser discs we own, even to preserve them - let alone embed parts of them in power point presentations, like we want to do. One thing I do know is that copyright, as applies to schools is a gradient of gray, never black and neverwhite.

    Sera
  • If we're talking about the roots then most of the tracks should be over 50 years old - you could legally post them in Europe.

    Of course if it's one of those fake courses that skips over the real roots and plays more modern stuff then that doesn't work. Then again would you want to learn anything from a course that glossed over the real history? ;-)

    • If we're talking about the roots then most of the tracks should be over 50 years old - you could legally post them in Europe.

      But if it's being taught in the United States, then it doesn't really matter where the songs are posted in; it matters where the songs are posted from, that is, the laws of the soil where a human being controls the compilation. This would be the United States, where copyrights on sound recordings last effectively forever. Because of a technicality in the U.S. copyright law, new c

  • Compulsory licensing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by senahj ( 461846 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @07:39PM (#7849589)

    The campus radio station should broadcast the
    songs at a specific time -- the copyright holders
    would get a small compensation.

    Then the professor should ask the students to each
    tape that broadcast for personal use, which they are
    legally allowed to do.
    • You are not "legally" allowed to tape off radio. It is just impossible to track and prosecute.

      I don't think that there is a pay for play radio cost either, unless there are different rules in your country. The basic argument was that the radio stations simply stopped playing the music and the public stopped buying so the record industry decided they could not do this.

      In fact I found out that there is a scheme for major radio stations to get paid by the record companies for playing their music. There ar
      • The composer (not the recording "artist") receives payment when a song is played on the radio. If you remember, this caused a lot of complaining when the Librarian of Congress set the rates for webcast radio, since web radio stations don't have any money to spend.
      • >You are not "legally" allowed to tape off radio. It is just impossible to track and prosecute.

        You know, I thought that once too. Then someone mentioned this [eff.org], which allows you to do exactly that. Tape broadcast material.
    • but it doesn't quite give them the flexibility they'd need to digitally mix and rmx the songs on a computer. FM mp3/ogg/acc CD. I like it though, cause its a nifty hack to get around the damn licensing problems. You could even plug a UBS/Firewire FM tuner into your boxen and avoid the extra step w/tapes
  • da denk i wurkli
  • The prof should give you a cd list along with a copy of the reading list for the course. I doubt they are giving books away at your uni, why should they give away other pieces for the class.

    I would also question the value of having an entire piece available to students. What's the point. Do you really need to listen to various pieces of black music of the 40's to know that's where Elvis and Buddy Holly stole their playing style?

    Since this is obviously a 'frippery', useless class, why doesn't the prof exam
  • You should use free software like QuickTime Streaming Server. The students can listen to the files via streaming, but they cannot copy them. This should satisfy even the most paranoid university administrators.
    QTSS, or its variant Darwin Streaming Server, runs on MacOS X, Windoze, RedHat, BSD, and probably others. Files can be received with the free QuickTime player on Mac and PCs, and if you use formats like MP3, are probably acceptable on any OS you could find. The new version of QTSS has improved adminis
    • I'm setting something like this up at the school where I work. We've got a 2500+ CD 'Jazz Library' and instead of loaning CDs out to students we're digitizing all the content. We intend to make records in the library's card catalog which is accessible to all students via a web browser, the virtual cards will have 'rtsp:' URLs pointing to the streaming server. We've checked with a few labels and a lawyer and they all say it's alright as long as the students can't actually make straight copies of the data, wh
      • You don't need MacOS X Server to run QTSS, although you do get extra QTSS administrative goodies if you have the Server edition. You certainly don't need Unlimited edition, the Unlimited is just filesharing licenses, doesn't have anything to do with streaming. I'm running Darwin Streaming Server on plain old MacOS X, it works fine, no limitations.
        You ought to look into Compressor, it comes with Final Cut Pro and probably other products. Compressor can create a drag n drop applet that can invoke Applescript,
        • Thanks, We're aware that we can run DSS on a variety of systems, but we've already got an XServe with OSX server on it, we're going to have to upgrade it to 10.3 anyway for some of the better Active Directory integration features. The 'administration goodies' are vital, as I intend to give the Jazz teacher control over the QTSS aspect of the project after I get it working. As for QTExpress, it will do that stuff, but we need the catalog output to a proprietary Access DB (or a format it can input easily) th
  • What does your university use for music appreciation classes? When I was in school, our history of western music textbook had an accompanying CD set to buy. For those that didn't/couldn't buy it, they had the examples for you to listen to in the library.

    The professor should find a rock-n-roll anthology series of CDs with the music and have the campus book stores offer it for sale. Then have the library have them available for listening or checkout. Or maybe get a couple of local bands to do covers of the s

  • Couldn't you just use iTunes [apple.com]. At $.99 a download the school might pay for the professor to download them and then he could burn them onto a CD and distribute those to the class. CD-Rs usually cost about $1 a piece, less if you buy a bigger package. So this could all be done for less than $200 if I'm not mistaken. If you have 100 people everyone could pay $5 and that would more than cover the downloads, the CDs, and leave some extra for other expenses. Just a thought.
  • When I was in school, we had to pay up to $150 per book for some classes. We couldn't (legally) photocopy someone else's entire book, or use full copies on the Internet. We had to pay for the book...

    Why not do the same thing for music coursework? Everyone would be required to buy the 50 songs listed for the course. At 99 cents each, that's about the same price as a book.

    Alternatively, the professor could legally post 30-second samples of each song. Though not optimal, s/he could at least pick sections o

  • Taking a similar class at my school, what is the problem with using a textbook, that contains a CD (legally done by the publisher) of selected works? In my music appreciation class, our literature for the class included 4 CDs (or 4 tapes for that matter). And if you purchase the book, you purchase the CDs that come along with it.

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