Marie and I attended the Learning on Screen: Copyright exceptions post Gowers / Taking Down Television II conference held this year as a one day event at the British Library. It was organised by the BUFVC. The copyright focus meant I attended rather than other colleagues in CLT and it also had useful updates on ERA+ Licence which Marie and I hoped would be useful for the MIDESS Project. The conference was opened by Lynne Brindley from the BL, and the morning focused on looking at the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property carried out last year by the Treasury. Various speakers reported on Gowers and what it meant to them including Toby Bainton from SCONUL, Andrew Yeates from ERA, Laurence Bebbington and Richard McCracken. The overall consensus was that Gowers very much was about striking a balance, but that fair dealing really doesn’t go far enough in allowing those in education to use copyrighted works in the way they would like to. There was also a sense that we could see many rights in copyright law being overriden by contract law. The OU in particularly felt that copyright laws tend to focsu too much on different media and the location of a person, rather than what their primary purpose was. So why shoudl distance learning or e-learning be any different to learning in a classroom? However, Gowers has certainly raised the profile of IPR so that can be no bad thing.

There was considerable discussion about the proposal to allow broadcasts to be shown off campus under the ERA+ Licence, but a general feeling that the price was rather high, given that material couldn’t be shown outside the UK.

The afternoon’s session’s switched from copyright to more general sessions on using broadcast and other video material in teaching. Marianne Open and Markeda Cole from BUFVC showed us the enhancements to TRILT, which will allow subscribing institutions to request off-air broadcasts from BUFVC using the database. And you can order on DVD or CD in Wondwos Media and QuickTime format. Ed Zedlewski from Eduserv talked to us about authentication and the shoft from Athens to Open Athens using Shibboleth technology. He also talked about the growing demand for people to have a lifelong identity not linked to their educational institution and how this could be managed in the future. Andrew Milburn from Planet PC talked about streaming media and how bandwidth problems can be solved with their Planet eStream service. Finally Tony Blake and Ian Mottishead from Cambridge Imaging Systems show us BoB (Box of Broadcasts) a system to manage and record off-air recordings at an institutional level. It was developed for the BUFVC but is also being used by Bournemouth University. It allows members of the institution to record their own TV programmes, to store and edit clips and to play them back for classroom or personal use. The system was particularly impressive and even has access management built into it. Murray Weston from BUFVC concluded the day with some throughts and I took away from the day the idea that we really must collaborate more in this area and look to find a way to share digital video collections. I guess this idea ties in really well with MIDESS in many ways and what we are trying to acheive.