Friday, July 21, 2000

Copyright Office's Head Says Current Law Restrains Distance Education By DAN CARNEVALE Washington The head of the U.S. Copyright Office told a Congressional commission Thursday that current copyright law inhibits the growth of online education. But the president of a publishers' group retorted that changing the law could hurt copyright holders' ability to maintain control of their works. Marybeth Peters, the U.S. register of copyrights, said that the provision for "fair use" should be expanded so that any copyrighted materials that can be used freely in classrooms can also be used online for distance-education courses. But Patricia Schroeder, who is president of the Association of American Publishers and is a former Democratic U.S. representative from Colorado, said Congress needs to be careful of how far it loosens the copyright restrictions, or authors may be hurt in the process. The commission, known as the Congressional Web-based Education Commission, is made up of members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate and representatives of higher-education institutions and organizations. Its members heard testimony on Wednesday as the commission ended its fourth meeting. It is scheduled to make recommendations in November on what laws Congress should change to accommodate the growth of online education. The current copyright law was written in 1976 and limits the "fair use" of copyrighted works for educational purposes to settings in which students meet in a classroom, Ms. Peters said. The law makes it much more difficult for a professor to use a clip of a movie in an online course than in a face-to-face course, she said. The law's "fair-use" exemptions do not extend to online education, Ms. Peters said, and the law therefore limits the growth of distance education. "Emerging markets should be able to develop with minimal government interference," she said. The Copyright Office released a report in May 1999 that called on Congress to make the copyright law technology-neutral, so that all its provisions would apply to the Internet. But Congress has taken little action on the issue, she said. However, Ms. Schroeder said putting copyrighted works, such as videos and sound clips, on the Internet could be dangerous. She said security measures available today don't prevent people from capturing the materials and distributing them without the authors' permission. If they lose control over their own material, she said, authors may lose the incentive to produce creative works. Distance education, Ms. Schroeder said, seems to be thriving now and can continue to coexist with current the copyright law. "I don't think you need to change any of the laws to make this market work," she said. Sen. Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat who is chairman of the commission, said after the meeting that the recommendations made in the copyright report last year and reiterated by Ms. Peters should be studied so that the law can be updated. He said he hoped that the Copyright Office and publishers could reach a compromise on rewording the law. "Some kind of exemptions need to be provided," Senator Kerrey said. "There clearly is an access problem." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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