{"id":173,"date":"2006-08-10T11:55:55","date_gmt":"2006-08-10T15:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/2006\/08\/10\/173\/"},"modified":"2006-12-10T05:21:42","modified_gmt":"2006-12-10T09:21:42","slug":"173","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/2006\/08\/10\/173\/","title":{"rendered":"New Berkman Report on Educational Use of Works in the Digital Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

As part of the Digital Media Project,<\/a> Berkman Faculty Director Terry Fisher<\/a> and Berkman Fellow Bill McGeveran<\/a> just released a terrific study entitled “The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age”<\/a>, exploring whether innovative educational uses of digital technology \u2013 ranging from DVDs in the classroom to online resources such as Wikipedia – are hampered by copyright restrictions. Here’s the abstract:<\/p>\n

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<\/a>This foundational white paper reports on a year-long study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, examining the relationship between copyright law and education. In particular, we wanted to explore whether innovative educational uses of digital technology were hampered by the restrictions of copyright. We found that provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law, are among the most important obstacles to realizing the potential of digital technology in education.<\/p>\n

The paper builds on four detailed case studies of initiatives that have encountered such obstacles. Each of these initiatives is moving forward, but only by fighting against a copyright-related system that instead should be helping educators accomplish their goals. The four case studies are:<\/p>\n