Some of you have been with me when I mentioned to teachers the availability of PBS videos on NC LIVE. I believed that as NC citizens and taxpayers, anyone who was authorized as a library user could access these and, since it would be fair use to show them in a F2F classroom, teachers could include these in their teaching. I was wrong.
Apparently there is a willingness to pay in the school audience. If you are familiar with the 4 factors you must consider to determine if something is covered by fair use, you will see right away that if PBS considers the schools another potential paying customer, then we are violating fair use by showing these videos without paying for them. If you are unfamiliar with fair use, see David’s entry in the LEARN NC education reference area, http://www.learnnc.org/glossary/fair+use
Long term, the implications of segmenting the audience and charging schools as a separate customer is disturbing. We are essentially being charged twice if both NC LIVE and NC Wiseowl subscribe to the same content. Twice the tax money to the vendor for the same content. How can that be OK? Maybe if/when NC Wiseowl seeks to add the same content, PBS will give us a price break since all of the public library, community college library and university library users already are authorized as NC LIVE users. I certainly hope so.
It is all based on willingness to pay, which brings me to the most important issue… we must use our fair use exemptions or we will lose them. The more we hesitate and contact vendors to purchase an article here or there, the more we are signaling that there is another market for selling the content. It will be scary indeed when all the content and information is only available for fee.
Sorry for the rant, but you can see I feel strongly about this, and if you are still reading, thanks for listening.