Re: the boundaries of educational use

Marly Snow writes, quite interestingly, that:

"The copyright act does have a face to face limitation that is probably causing the attorney to make the distinction between the four walls of the classroom and the network. I don't think I understand the original intent of the face to face limitation, but it could be to ensure that non-profit education was actually occurring, and of course it was written into law before the advent of networked personal computers. It is this face to face limitation that doesn't make sense in today's computing environment."

I think that for many on the list, especially those of us involved in education and not-for-profit activities, Snow's point about the inadequacy of present law in general and the face-to-face requirement in particular is right on target.

Is anyone on this list familiar with unsuccessful litigation where the defendant "got away" with the educational fair use of copyrighted material without satisfying the face-to-face requirement? Is the face-to-face requirement really out of date? Would some sort of software certification of educational use be sufficient to use the network to distribute for classroom use the images in question?

Michael Roy
<roy[_at_]husc.harvard.edu> Received on Tue Mar 01 1994 - 14:09:45 GMT