New "Copyright Alliance" lies, cheats, steals to get professors to ask permission to show films in class!
Copyright Alliance Proposes Wiki to Help Professors Get Permissions for Classroom UseWashington -- So a professor wants to show Monty Python and the Holy Grail to her class on British humor, and she wants to check with the film studio to get permission. How would she do that? As it stands, the semester could be over by the time the professor even finds the right person to ask.
A nonprofit group called the Copyright Alliance, whose members include associations for the motion-picture and recording industries, announced today that it would like to help broker such requests. The idea, described briefly at an academic symposium held by the group on Monday in Washington, is to create a Web site where professors could post questions like the the one above and get answers from an industry official. The online resource would take the form of a wiki, a communal Web site that allows visitors to easily post new comments and track the changes that have been made. ...
Apparently neither the crooks who run this "Copyright Alliance" nor the reporters and editors of the Chronicle of Higher Ed realize that showing films in class is EXPLICITLY allowed under Sec. 110 of the Copyright Act.
17 USC § 110: “the following are not infringements of copyright: (1) 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…”
This is outrageous. Can we sue these people?
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