Kanopy is an on-demand streaming video service for educational institutions that provides students and faculty with access to more than 26,000 films each year. Kanopy offers award-winning collections including titles from PBS, BBC, Criterion Collection, Media Education Foundation and more.
Please contact the library for access to films
Now contains the complete suite of videos in the following subjects, Health, Medicine, Humanities, Social Sciences, Business, Economics & Sciences. A state-of-the-art streaming video platform that makes it easier than ever to incorporate outstanding educational programs. Select one video or 1,000 programs - the choice is yours! With more than 6,000 available titles, Films On Demand allows you to customize your school or library's video collection to meet your specific content needs.
Educational videos for colleges and K-12 schools.
For more information, head to the University of Rhode Island University Libraries Copyright guide.
The video examples and tips from this LibGuide are courtesy of the Univ. of Rhode Island University Libraries.
To best position yourself to assert a fair use argument when using video, consider doing the following:
Professor Wang is teaching an online Introduction to Film Studies course. Her face-to-face version of the class meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for 50 minutes, with three-hour film screening sessions on Tuesday evenings. Students in the class learn about formal analysis, genre studies, film history, and theory. Through class lectures and readings, watching films, and several short papers, students gain the basic critical tools necessary for understanding and analyzing the language of motion pictures. The films studied in the course are: Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz), Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles), Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard), The Virgin Suicides (1999, Sofia Coppola), The Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio De Sica), and Walk Hard (2007, Jake Kasdan).
The online course is being offered over the summer. Many students are working full time or have moved home, therefore they are not able to go to the Walsh Library to watch the films there. So that students can view the assigned movies, Professor Wang uploads her DVD copies of the films to the university's streaming server. The streamed films will be available to students through ECN for the duration of the summer semester only. Only students registered for the course will be able to access the films, and students will not be able to download or copy the films. Is this fair use?
Analysis
1. Did the use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a broadly beneficial purpose different from that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
Yes, Professor Wang's use is transformative, since she is using films originally produced for entertainment purposes to educate students about film history and theory. The professor and the students are subjecting the films to critical commentary and detailed analysis in a noncommercial educational context.
2. Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?
These films are creative works, and they were used in their entirety, which would tend to weigh against fair use. However, given that the use is transformative and takes place for educational purposes, the use is more likely to be fair. Students are not normally expected to purchase copies of films as course materials; rather they rely on the copy acquired by the university library. In this way, Professor Wang's streaming of the films did not cause market harm to the copyright owners.
Fair use: Yes.
Note: The transformative and educational nature of Professor Wang's use of the films and the facts that access was limited to students enrolled in her class and that students could not copy or download the films support a fair use argument. This does not mean, however, that the copying of video content to university servers in order to stream it to students will not be challenged by rightsholders. In fact, the Association for Information Media recently sued the University of California Los Angeles for copyright infringement for doing exactly this. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds, so no decision was rendered on the legality of streaming.
The Walsh University Library supports streaming video services. Please contact the Library if you have questions regarding finding, embedding, or using library supported streaming content in your classes.
Professor Mercer is preparing to teach a face-to-face nursing class. She plans to use ECN to post the course syllabus and grades and to allow students to hand in assignments. As she's working on her syllabus, she receives in the mail an examination copy of Mosby's Nursing Video Skills - Student Version DVD, 4th Edition (Elsevier, 2013). She reads the description on the back of the DVD: "With high-definition videos demonstrating how to perform nursing procedures, Mosby's Nursing Video Skills provides up-to-date, step-by-step instructions for the most important nursing skills. Printable procedure checklists and interactive screens of required equipment make it easier to learn and remember skills, and new animations show what’s happening inside the patient’s body. For each skill, NCLEX exam-style review questions help you assess your knowledge." Noting that five of the procedures she will be covering in class are included on the DVD, she asks the library to copy these segments and upload them to the university's streaming server so that she can embed them in Sakai for students to view. Since there are a total of 130 procedures on the DVD, she's using less than 5% of the content. Is this fair use?
Analysis
1. Did the use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a broadly beneficial purpose different from that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
No, Professor Mercer's intended use is not transformative. The original purpose of the DVD is to instruct nursing students in how to perform certain skills, and Professor Mercer wants to use the video for the same purpose.
2. Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?
This video is a work of nonfiction, which favors fair use. However, the DVD is marketed for nursing students. It is likely that Professor Mercer's intended use of the video (and other uses like hers, were they to occur) would damage the market for the DVD, since students would rely on the streaming content instead of purchasing their own copies of the DVD. Thus the amount she wants to use, though a small part of the total, is not appropriate.
Fair use: No.
Note: According to the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, "Closer scrutiny should be applied to uses of content created and marketed primarily for use in courses such as the one at issue (e.g., a textbook, workbook, or anthology designed for the course). Use of more than a brief excerpt from such works on digital networks is unlikely to be transformative and therefore unlikely to be a fair use." The fair use argument is helped, however, by the fact that the videos were placed in ECN and limited to students enrolled in the course.