TEACH

Technology, Educations and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002 - It turns out the TEACH Act is finally a refreshing point in the ongoing copyright mess. Thomas Lipinski from the School of Information Studies at UW-Milwaukee came and spoke to us and provided us with some useful tools. Portions of the TEACH Act are somewhat hard to understand so it was helpful to have an expert there to wade through the material with the class.

Perhaps the two most important points that I immediately picked up on were that the TEACH Act is only for accredited, non-profit higher education institutes (which makes the Act apply to a very specific area of education). Additionally, the TEACH Act treats different categories of works differently, which means that you don't always have to default to fair use. The language withing these different categories is somewhat vague, but either way, it provides some clarification in areas that would otherwise default to fair use. It also seems that it was written in such a way that the Act complies with the DMCA - there are pieces of copyright law, especially the DMCA that contradict or clash with another piece of the law, so it's nice to have something that works in accordance with the DMCA.

TEACH doesn't completely cover fair use and copyright and always work in an institution's favor - it excludes all material the University may have already known was being used illegally, and faculty still need to work with materials they know they will actually use (if they then have to resort to fair use, it's much easier to).