Digital Content Distribution

[St0rMl0rD]

Hi everyone,

This is not a Jamf related question, but since there's so many smart people here, I thought I'd ask anyways, hope it's OK.

I have a question on something we’re trying to figure out, and maybe someone else is already doing something that we could be “inspired by” :) We’re running into situations recently where our teachers have the need of giving access to digital content (movies, audio books, etc.) that is copyright protected, to the students on a temporary basis. For example, films that we still have on DVDs but where the discs are slowly failing, we’d like to get somewhere else, and be able to either display it in classroom (not a big problem, iTunes etc.), or take either the whole work or parts of it (audio book) and have the students be able to access it (even if just by streaming).

Have you come across this issue, and maybe found a good and easy solution? We're located in Europe BTW.

Would be awesome to hear from everyone's experiences!

[tjhall]

Don't have any experience but there's probably a legal way and non legal (or grey area).I assume you in theory should have a license for each copy of book, software or DVD which you distribute (unless you're able to purcshase a education or "use in ublic" license). Buying one copy with a specific Itunes account to continously use works but it quickly becomes impractical.

[St0rMl0rD]

Yeah, I haven't seen any examples where anyone would have this figured out yet..

[rhoward]

@damienbarrett has something they did at their school using Plex Media Server. You should consult you lawyers before going into ripping DVDs and distributing them.

[jefff]

At one of my previous employers in the US, the faculty were big on ripping DVDs and online videos and importing them into the CMS for student use, with no oversight. I and other members of the IT staff explained to them the riskiness of that approach, from a copyright standpoint. Their (admittedly weak) justification was that they didn't want to have to depend on the students' Internet connection working sufficiently well to stream the video course material from its source.

This seems like an area where your librarians may be able to offer guidance on strategies and tools for using that media in a way that falls within the boundaries of fair use.