As reported earlier this month in LibraryJournal.com, a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed a copyright infringement and breach of contract suit filed against The Regents of University of California and UCLA by the Association for Information, Media and Equipment (AIME), a nonprofit trade association of educational video publishers, and New York-based Ambrose Video Publishing (AVP).
As reported in February on www.documentary.org, the plaintiffs charged that UCLA had illegally streamed copyright-protected DVD titles hundreds of times for use by faculty and students both on and off campus on the University's Web-based Intranet, using a technology system called Video Furnace, which enables the recording of content and subsequent delivery as video-on-demand to computers and set-top boxes. UCLA countered these challenges, claiming fair use as well as a public performance exemption for face-to-face teaching and digital distance learning uses.
According to the court filing, UCLA has placed over 2,500 titles on its file server for use by students and faculty. The titles include hundreds of documentary films distributed by such respected companies as The Criterion Collection, California Newsreel, Women Make Movies, among many others.
Judge Consuelo B. Marshall, of the US District Court for the Central District of California, based much of her decision on the fact that AIME did not hold any of the copyrights. She ruled that "to establish a claim for copyright infringement, individual copyrights owners' participation is necessary." Marshall also ruled that given UCLA had the right of public performance of the DVDs, the university was entitled to post the content on its Intranet, which, according to the ruling "does not take the viewing of the DVD out of the educational context," regardless of the source of access. The plaintiffs had argued that streaming is not included in public performance because it can be accessed outside of a classroom.
Under Section 110 of the Copyright Act, the allowable contexts for educational performances of DVD include face-to-face situations and transmissions.
As Kevin Smith, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, told LibraryJournal.com, "It is possible, at least, for a school to argue for what UCLA was doing based on an amalgam of these two exceptions, or based on fair use (which is a separate and distinct exception). As it turned out, however, UCLA did not need to make either of these arguments because of the license language that permitted public performances. The judge interpreted that language to include a closed performance over a campus network and thus ruled that the license settled that part of the matter."
For more commentary on the ruling, click here and here.
For a copy of the ruling, click here.