TEACH and Downstream Controls

One of the most challenging requirements imposed by the TEACH Amendments involve the “downstream controls”. Downstream controls, or controlling uses of a work after an authenticated user has legitimately accessed the work, is a problem of (nearly) first impression for institutions of higher education.

Commercial content industries, however, have been engaged with these issues for some time now and a variety of types of digital rights management products are being developed and/or available. Most, if not all, of these products are designed for the corporate setting rather than higher education. As a result, they are:

• Not multi-platform (generally only work in the Windows environment)

• Are not scaleable (not designed for tens of thousands of users)

• Require hardware or software to be installed by the user

• Require expertise and time to apply (beyond that typically characteristic of university faculty)

• Are prohibitively expensive

• Do not integrate with the current university computing environment

• Do not allow fair uses

Fortunately, however, the law does not require that these technical measures protect perfectly or absolutely . The standard under the TEACH amendments is a more rational “discourage most users” standard as opposed to an absolute “enforcement” of certain rights or prohibition of particular uses. The language of the TEACH Act reflects this:

For transmissions of digital works, the institution must apply technical measures that reasonably prevent:

“retention of the work in accessible form by recipients of the transmission from the transmitting body or institution for longer than the class session and unauthorized further dissemination of the work in accessible form by such recipients to others.”

Applying Downstream Controls at NC State:

NC State University has developed a solution for protecting images for its faculty as follows:

How do I protect copyrighted images?

If you are displaying a copyrighted image on your course web page, you can protect the image from downloading and further distribution, and be in compliance with this condition of the TEACH Act, by doing the following:

1. Get a WolfWare Locker. The WolfWare webservers are the only campus servers modified to protect your images, so, if you don't have a WolfWare locker for your course, request one at https://wolfware.ncsu.edu/wrap-bin/admintool?task=rnl

2. Make a teach directory. Once your locker is created and you have access to it, create a “teach” directory in the www/wrap/directory of your locker. All of your TEACH protected content and graphics will need to reside in this folder.

3. Add a protect attribute to your image. When inserting an image into your web page, add the attribute: teach='protect' to the image (img) tag for images you want to protect. In your web page editor, you will need to add this tag in the HTML source code. Example:

<img src=”graphics/daisy.gif” width=”393” height=”297” border=”0” teach='protect' alt=”A Daisy”>

Note: You should only add this attribute to images you want to protect. Don't add the attribute to banners or other non-copyrighted images on the page.

4. Upload your web pages and images to the teach directory. After adding the teach='protect' attribute, you will need to upload both your web page and the associated graphic to the teach directory (inside www/wrap) in WolfWare. Placing material under the wrap directory ensures that users must login to see material in the director. As the TEACH Act states that only students registered in a course can have access to copyright material, such materials must reside under the wrap directory. The WolfWare servers will ensure that only students in the class will have access to the teach directory, and they will only protect content if it is within the teach directory. Within the teach directory, you can have additional directories; e.g. a graphics subdirectory, to organize your files, as illustrated in the preceding HTML source code example.

Where can I get further assistance?

If you have questions or concerns regarding the TEACH Act or copyright laws, please contact Peggy Hoon, peggy_hoon@ncsu.edu , at the NCSU Libraries Scholarly Communication Center.

If you need additional assistance in adding the teach='protect' attribute to protect copyrighted images in your web pages, please email learntech@ncsu.edu .

Copyright Notice and License Terms for the “TEACH Act Downstream Control” Program

Disclaimer

Copyrighted image protection will add additional formatting to your web pages, thus it is possible that adding this attribute may alter the intended page formatting and display.

Last major modification February 5, 2005, Donna Petherbridge (minor mod 9/23/05 Lou Harrison)