Manet on the hill

Last week, Gavin Dudney from That’sLife poised some questions to ESL authors stemming from a debate on piracy and illegally copied EST books:

“Do I use copyright material in class without permission? Have I used images from the Net without permission (in presentations, etc.)? Have I ripped or used commercial movie clips in class or in presentations?”

I’m sure like most teachers who liberally draw from the plethora of media that are at our fingertips, I have to admit that YES, YES, and YES I freely use copyrighted materials in lessons.  Gavin’s point was that likely the great majority of us use the intellectual property of others in one way or another, and wondered if people inclined to taking pirated music or movies would also do so with digitally available books.  Now were I to someday become a published ESL author, I wouldn’t find many stones to cast.  But the ethical questions are interesting and as I was forming a reply for the discussion in the blog comments, I think my arguments went somewhere else, so I’ll continue here.

To recast the questions from the movie theatre warnings – you wouldn’t steal a book from a bookshop, so is downloading different?  By copying, are you lifting the result of someone’s long, hard work without compensating the author?  But those are pretty hollow questions.  And I suppose that the economic questions about whether or not I can pay for this work don’t address the issue – no, I can’t afford to pay for what I use, but a price can be arbitrarily moved up or down to maximize profit or meet the willing buyer as the case may be.  Nor do legal questions get to the debate.  The ridiculously antiquated copyright laws on the books are insufficient – as such, it’s almost impossible to not run afoul.  No, I would never copy a DVD and sell it in the street, or download and print an entire coursebook and use it for my own course.   But, when I consider the specifics of what I am doing when I go to the classroom with media – a copyrighted image or a downloaded song or a photocopied worksheet (or worse, in my case) – I find a much more complex and interesting process at work.

Through years of teaching, my folders and hardrive are full of pictures, texts, and audio that have built up, and in one way or another it’s most likely copyrighted.  I’ve copypasted a reading from a newspaper or I’ve pulled images off of Flickr, and I’ve taken all this freely because at some point the content owner set it out there in the stream of infinitely copiable information that we all draw from.  Where I live, you don’t walk around with your wallet in your back pocket.  But I still need to get to the ethics.

Have I stolen that New York Times article?  Well, I think I’m probably covered by fair use on that one.  Copyright law is arbitrarily more lenient when you’re trading in reading than in big-money entertainment. But how about those MP3s of “It’s a Wonderful World” or “People Are Strange” for those beginner music lessons?  Well, I suppose I didn’t go shoplifting to get the songs on the CD that I couldn’t have afforded anyway.  I found the songs, copied them, and incorporated them into a lesson.  But I don’t think that gets me off legally, even if they weren’t used for my own personal enjoyment (and I assure you, I get no personal enjoyment from these trite old songs).

But here’s a blatant copyright crime.  I was once hired to design a series of lessons based on a popular Disney movie that a company had selected.  The company bought the DVD to use in the classes, so Disney got their royalty (although at the letter of the law, somebody probably violated a “public performance” article in the DVD’s FBI warning.  Please don’t turn us in for that one).  I completed the lessons then I moved on from the institute, and now I have the lessons saved for whenever I want to use them because the lessons are mine.  But now I need a copy of the movie, not for my own enjoyment (and after the myriad dozens times I watched the movie while preparing the classes, I never want to watch that movie again).   I just need a handful of scenes from the movie.  They don’t sell scenes, they sell an expensive piece of reflective plastic with the entire movie, take it or leave it.  But of course, a free copy of the movie is at my fingertips, ready to download in its entirety.  That’s definitely illegal, probably unethical.  But what if I take the complete, pirated .AVI file and, with video editing software, cut out the snippets I need for the lessons?  I’ll delete the rest and pay Disney if I ever want to see the movie in its entirety, which I won’t.  All I need is samples of the movie.

In using media in a lesson, could this suggest an entirely different process of copying, something distinct from simply consuming the goods of another without paying for it?  Am I sampling the movie, like a Hip Hop track?  Am I referencing another work in a new, original work?  Am I placing an image in a new context to change the way that it is contemplated? What if I resequence individual works in a new whole, like the cassette mixtapes we passed around as teenagers, way back when music was only mechanically copiable so the RIAA couldn’t be bothered to wage financial death penalties in order to recoup the value of that Goo Goo Doll’s track. Here, I find an explanation much more interesting than legal condemnation or economic justification.

Let me bring this back to Gavin’s original discussion about ESL books and their emerging digital availability, authorized or otherwise.  I’ve used the Cutting Edge series in past courses.  I think the books are pretty cool, more topical, they fit in with the conversations that tend to come up in my classes.  I’ve had a lot of success with these books at institutes where I used to work and a lot of my own lessons and activities and worksheets have grown from altering this content to suit my own style and make it more relevant to particular learners.  I’ve returned the borrowed books to the institutes and moved on, but I’ve taken the extra activities and the alterations with me.  The activities are my work, but they’re work that depends on fitting with a piece of the original copyrighted material.  I know where to download the Cutting Edge books online, freely, illegally, unethically, it’s a very popular series so perhaps it’s the pirated, downloaded ESL book equivalent of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I haven’t downloaded the books yet, and I probably won’t, but they sit there at my fingertips like the MP3 of that annoying Louis Armstrong song and the pirated copy of the Disney movie – I can look through the books sitting on a web page through a streamable document viewer.

If I download and print the entire book and base a course off of it, clearly I’ve stolen something.  But what if I look up an activity in the pirated copy of the Teacher’s Resource Pack that’s posted for viewing online?  Ah, here’s that clever pelmanism for prepositions of movement, and a fun quiz about sports trivia to introduce questions forms, and this listening about Debra Veal’s solo journey across the Atlantic has always made a great lesson (and I still have the audio CD that the school copied for its 70 teachers – I suppose that’s illegal).  The material is right in front of me with a simple google search, so how far am I allowed to go sampling the material?  Can I recreate the activity in my own words?  Copy the page I need?  Should I send the publisher a check for Payment=(# of Pages Copied / Total Pages) X  (Cost of Entire Book)?  Or do I move on, find another activity? I’ll just pretend I never saw it right there in front of me on the Internet since it is only attainable at a price and in a format determined by the publisher and since I cannot meet that price, we are at an impasse.

I like the book, I appreciate the work that was put into the course, it’s well-written material, interesting contexts, rich images, and its authors should be rightly compensated.  But individual items in the book – let’s use the resource pack for examples: snap!,  a find-your-partner activity, dominos, snakes and ladders, a trivia quiz – these are standard, tried and true activity ideas that have been repackaged into this course and dozens like it.  This is part of the folk tradition of lesson ideas, a teacher sharing an activity with a colleague, a lesson-share web site, or even the way that activity resource books a generation ago – Penny Ur’s Five Minute Activities, for example – regularly acknowledge the other books that were around at the time: “This idea is a variation on an activity from Mario Rinvolucri in his book…,” classroom ideas mutate from a games book to a collection of “Business English activities,” the ideas of pairing countability with food vocabulary or possessive adjectives and family descriptions, and when I’m looking at this wealth of material sitting there for free on the internet, I’m taking part in the same process – pulling out the ideas I like and passing them on.  By meekly adhering to copyright law as it’s written, is there a conflict between the naturally collaborative practice of teaching and the booming business of language teaching media?

So to answer the questions that Gavin posted, when I use media in classes, I steal like Francis Drake.  And as books complete their inevitable transition to digital formats, we’ll turn on that industry all the questions and conundrums concerning the use and dissemination of media that have already surrounded music and movies.  Let’s hope publishers don’t succumb to the same fatal idiocy that the RIAA and MPAA  have shown by fighting tooth and claw in protecting what’s left of their dying reflective-piece-of-plastic cartel.  But as ESL publications get closer and closer to our fingertips, slipping through the trade barriers that keep us teachers from readily accessing these materials from certain corners of the world, and as these once justifiable cost barriers become more and more artificial, how does this change the ethics of copying, or another view, the freedom to actively participate in what you find?

If I question my own often deliberate piracy, I find far more fascinating questions than “You wouldn’t shoplift a DVD from a shop, would you?”  Of course not – what I do is something else entirely.