Michael Evans
Keele University

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.90.10

These days lecturers are caught between a brick wall and a hard place in respect of copyright law and responsibility to the students they are teaching. Students quite naturally like to be able to peruse a lecture both before and after it has been given, and for this they ask for the lecture to be uploaded onto the University intranet (Virtual Learning Environment, VLE) as a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF. But such an act, if it concerns a lecture that includes scanned or downloaded diagrams from textbooks or other published sources, will almost certainly infringe copyright law designed to protect the creators of the work (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents). To make matters worse, a lecturer has nowhere to hide as it is s/he who is infringing the law, not their employer the University.

This problem led me to investigate the possible ways forward, and none of them are particularly encouraging. In theory, one can get permission from publishers to publish their images, but this takes time (often a long time) and will probably incur a charge, and both will add up if this approach were to be followed over a complete lecture set. In my case at present, this amounts to about 30 lectures, and roughly each one contains 10-15 images. My university, and I expect most UK universities, has a digitization service that is licensed to copy material, with some restrictions, from the library’s collection. This works well, but again the time involved to precisely identify exactly what is to be copied and fill in the online form all adds up. Having done my PhD “in the old days” when diagrams were often drawn by hand, I have on occasions simply taken a sheet of paper and drawn the essential features of the image(s), scanned them, and produced a special online version of my lecture which can be uploaded onto the VLE legally (providing the original sources are acknowledged). But while doing this one is bound to ask “what am I doing?” with the usual persistent concern about the time taken, and that’s before the students feedback on their quality.

But perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel? The central complaint outlined above concerns the large amount of time necessary to comply with copyright law in order to grant students the ability to download lectures that include images taken from published sources. But is this a useful use of their time? Again, harking back to the old days, we used to say that we were at university to read Physiology, or whatever “science allied to Physiology” we were taking (to use the The Society vernacular). Might they be better off seeking out the original sources used in their lectures in the library, or online, and using that as a way to learn? Just because a VLE provides the ability to upload lectures including diagrams and images for student consumption doesn’t mean that this is its primary use, particularly in view of copyright law and what that means to lecturers.

I’m drawn to a single conclusion, and that it is best not to try to upload images onto the VLE. Perhaps a simple word document will suffice, just detailing the main points including the best sources. It could be a win-win situation in the long run, with lecturers both saving valuable time and not being drawn onto the wrong side of the law, students learning better (and perhaps attending more lectures), and the creators of the work being content that their legal rights are not being infringed.