Universities will take ¡°risks¡± on copyright and intellectual property rights infringement when recording lectures because there is still so much ¡°uncertainty¡± within the sector as to what is appropriate policy, according to the authors of new research into the issue.

The paper ¡°Lecture recording in higher education: risky business or evolving open practice¡±?reported that nearly three-quarters of UK institutions started lecture recording in 2016, but 40 per cent of respondents to the report¡¯s survey said that their institutions only ¡°kind of¡± had policy documents on the topic.

Jane Secker, co-author of the paper and copyright and digital literacy adviser at the London School of Economics, told Times Higher Education that?the topic remained ¡°an evolving area¡±.

¡°It¡¯s not so much that institutions don¡¯t have copyright policies, [it¡¯s] whether they had one [relating] to lecture recording,¡± she said. ¡°About a third of them have done [one], some people said they were developing one, a third said they didn¡¯t have one. A lot of the reason [for this] is that there¡¯s still a lot of uncertainty.¡±

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¡°When we were speaking to people at Jisc [the UK body that supports institutions¡¯ use of digital technologies] about their guidance, there was a sense that¡­in a private space, you may take greater risks [with lecture recording] than you would if you were putting together a Mooc (massive open online course).¡±

Their report, which surveyed 33 universities, found in almost all cases that the responsibility for copyright issues in lecture content lay with the lecturer but a ¡°significant amount of the policy documents did not make these responsibilities clear¡±. The paper recommends that universities ¡°make clear¡± who is responsible, but also ¡°provide supportive copyright advice¡­on issues such as the use of third party material in recorded lectures¡±.

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Chris Morrison, co-author and copyright compliance and licensing officer at the University of Kent, said that institutions had to determine where they funnelled their resources.

¡°It makes more sense to put resources into [Mooc activities] than it does trying to get into every single lecture and come up with a determination of what is and isn¡¯t legal, which isn¡¯t always clear,¡± he said. ¡°You have [cases] where the only way you would definitely know where the use of someone else¡¯s content without their permission is legal is if there was to be legal action.

¡°There has been a process of trying to harmonise copyright law across Europe¡­but what tends to happen with Moocs, they tend to rely on Creative Commons licences (enabling the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work), [so] it is possible to create resources that can be openly shared.¡±

Ane Land?y, academic librarian at the University of Bergen and a member of the International Copyright Literacy Network, said that although lecture recording was still in its infancy in Norway, there were similar issues there.

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¡°In the law faculty in my university, there is a lot of enthusiasm among staff to [record lectures], but they are experts on copyright law so they¡¯re very careful as to whether they¡¯re making it available,¡± she told É«ºÐÖ±²¥.

john.elmes@tesglobal.com