Where allowed by copyright law, digital uses for education, research and cultural heritage are contributing to social and economic development. This document describes some recent developmental uses of copyright limitations and exceptions that are relevant to the issues being discussed at the 43rd meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. The examples were collected by members of the Access to Knowledge Coalition.
Uses of Broadcasts
Uses of broadcasts, including fixing the contents of a signal for later use, are essential for many important public interests. Recorded broadcasts are used by archives to preserve history and culture, for example in the kind of African media collection that was destroyed in the University of Cape Town fire.[1] Broadcasts are used in education, including in online education of the kind that proliferated during school closings forced by the COVID-19 pandemic.[2] Broadcasted content may be used by researchers, including to enable media monitoring through text and data mining.[3] Broadcasts are used to facilitate translation, including to increase accessibility for people with disabilities.[4] All of these uses may require fixation (e.g. recording) content from a signal, which is subject to Article 7 of the Second Second Revised Draft Text For The Wipo Broadcasting Organizations Treaty. Many of these uses also require accessing and fixing the content of a signal that begins in another country as media today is globally transmitted through satellites, wire and airwaves.
Research
Training regional translation tools for endangered languages.
The digital environment enables text and data mining (TDM) research where large corpuses of material are created to search with computer algorithms. TDM can be used to train “artificial intelligence” machine learning programs. One example of the use of such technology is in the creation of machine translation tools, including for threatened languages. Many indigenous languages lack reading materials. For example, one official South African language (Ndebele) has no Wikipedia page. To train digital tools to translate, one needs to feed the programs written texts in those languages. But these texts may be located online or across borders where research exceptions in copyright may not obviously apply. For example, the Masakhane project involves text and data mining of general online resources, such as newspapers, blogs, etc., from numerous African countries. Some critical publishers of text do not grant permission for use in text and data mining research or do not respond to inquiries. Users of translation tools also face copyright barriers to providing translated versions of critical public service information such as news articles by public broadcasters or academic research articles — even though the publishers do not themselves provide such translations.
To fully permit the creation of tools needed to preserve and promote uses of indigenous African languages, laws should be clarified to permit fair uses for research and non-commercial translation. International law has an additional role to play to authorize the creation and sharing between researchers of corpuses of works lawfully reproduced to facilitate research, including text and data mining research.
Preservation
Preserving and replacing our cultural heritage: UCT library fire.
A fire at the University of Cape Town in 2021 destroyed a unique physical collection of African film and media. Much of the collection was not digitized or otherwise preserved off site, for reasons including perceived copyright barriers, rendering much of the content lost forever. In order to replace parts of the collection that still exist elsewhere, UCT must seek reproductions of the content from other archives and libraries, most of which exist only in other countries.
An international right to make reproductions and communications of works, including across borders, to pre-emptively preserve and to replace lost collections could help ensure that no collections of cultural heritage are permanently lost to humanity.
Education
Online teaching and course reserves.
Traditional teaching has always involved the sharing of printed resources which are shared with schoolchildren and college and university students. Blended and online teaching has been in place for many years, especially in distance education institutions (e.g. UNISA in South Africa has been teaching distance courses to students all over the continent for decades). Online teaching became the only mode of teaching for schools, colleges and universities during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period. Libraries and other information services were closed, so their hard copy collections were not accessible. To provide teaching and learning resources, educational institutions had to migrate to online teaching with very short notice. The restrictions in copyright law became very evident during the lockdown period and continues to do so, as online teaching becomes more popular. In many laws, for example, the law is unclear as to whether the same rights to make a work available in a physical reading room can be provided in an online context — which may implicate “communication to the public” in addition to traditional reproduction rights.
An international right to scan or digitise articles or extracts from books and other works and to share in closed networks for teaching, learning and research purposes would greatly facilitate the preparation of resources for and implementation of online educational programmes and curricula. It would also be useful to adopt an international rule similar to that in Article 5 of the EU’s CDSM, which clarifies the application of copyright rules when the teacher and some students are in different jurisdictions.
Libraries and Archives
Moving library services online.
Libraries and archives play a pivotal role in education and research. Libraries are statutorily mandated to provide access and perform various functions to complement or supplement teaching and learning. Libraries are custodians of large collections of printed works, multimedia and other works, but are not generally the rights holders. They also subscribe to many digital journals, databases and other material via licences, rather than direct ownership of the product. In the digital space, libraries and archives are seriously hampered by copyright laws that do not permit digitisation, format-shifting, conversion from old technologies to new ones, and digital sharing, including across borders. Such sharing is particularly important for populations that live far away from any physical library or from the library they most need for their research. Libraries can play a key role in facilitating research by creating digital corpuses of works for exclusive use by researchers, including text and data mining researchers. But they can provide these services only if they are permitted by copyright law to make copies for third parties.
An international duty to provide libraries rights to preserve and make available works through digital technologies would go a long way to enhancing library and archival services to patrons and the broader community. International law is particularly needed to
Literacy Programmes
Moving reading aloud programs online.
Public libraries (including school media centres) offer literacy programmes or reading circles to improve literacy levels in their communities, and in the process, advance educational development. Such programmes have been offered for decades and are a core function of libraries. Historically, these services have taken place in a physical library restricted to those who could reach that location. But the digital environment can enable libraries to expand their services to a much larger population, including across borders. During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, for example, librarians in countries with more open copyright exceptions for educational and library uses moved reading activities to digital platforms, including to YouTube or e-learning platforms, and served new expanded groups of citizens. Unfortunately, many librarians were prevented from providing this crucial literacy service because of restrictive copyright laws (e.g. requiring uses “on the premises” of a library), sometimes aggressively enforced by rights holders.
An international duty to extend library exceptions into the digital environment, including permitting cross border uses, would help libraries around the world contribute to literacy through online reading programs.
[1] Wendell Roelf, S.Africa’s UCT campus salvaging books from burned library, Reuters, (April 20, 2021) (describing the contents of an extensive African media collection destroyed by fire).
[2] See UNESCO, Survey on National Education Responses to COVID-19 School Closures (2021) (reporting that TV based education has been used in 87% of countries worldwide and radio based education in 61%).
[3] Ying LiYongbin WangJian YanYing-Jian Qi , The Application of Data Mining in Satellite TV Broadcasting Monitoring, Conference: Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Computational Sciences and Optimization, Sanya, Hainan, China, 24-26 April 2009, Volume 2 (discussing use of algorithms and a “data mining method” in satellite TV broadcasting monitoring).
[4] See Amelia Brust, Artificial intelligence helps Voice of America translate broadcasts worldwide, Federal News Network (Feb 18, 2020); Ram Sagar, Netflix Is Using AI For Its Subtitles, Analytics India Magazine (May 6, 2020).
