Copyright and Filtering Issues for Schools in the 21st Century

Schools in the 21st Century must contend with a variety of challenges stemming from the use of modern technologies in the classroom environment. This article focuses on two of the most prevalent issues faced by school administrators and teachers today–that of copyright compliance and protecting students from inappropriate web content.

The need for further treatment of this subject became apparent given the responses and interest generated by a recent Technology Tip I had written for the December 2009 issue of ISTE’s Learning & Leading with Technology. The Tip discussed a technique to mirror content of educational videos from a website commonly blocked by school web filters, YouTube, to a more school appropriate site that is typically not blocked, TeacherTube. The failure of that Tip to mention the requirement of obtaining permissions prior to reposting the content started a firestorm of controversy among leaders in the edtech community.

Needless to say, I submitted an errata to the publishers to point out that the article should have been prefaced with the wording “After obtaining permissions from the copyright owners,…” since the intent behind the tip was not to grant license for stealing intellectual property, but to share a useful technique for bringing educational content into the classroom that would otherwise be blocked from use by web filters.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 imposes a legal requirement on users of digital media to obtain permissions from owners of the intellectual property before reproducing it in any way, or using the material beyond the scope of personal private use. This mandate is, in effect, the modern equivalent of the prior era’s admonition against unauthorized photocopying of material from copyrighted books and publications. With the advent of mimeographs and photocopiers, school administrators began to implement policies and spread awareness of copyright issues among their staff when using these technologies to reproduce educational materials for use in the classroom. In the 21st Century, school administrators must further advise their staff that protection of intellectual property now extends into the digital realm, covering all online content that is not available under a free public use license.

In recognition of this critical need for educators to adopt and teach copyright sensitivity and Fair Use guidelines, ISTE revised the NETS-T standard to now formally address this area of concern (see NETS-T, Section 4, “Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility“). Another obvious question raised by the Tip is “Why do we need to filter online content in schools?” since it places educators in a position of needing to circumvent those mechanisms in order to access educational content for their classrooms hosted on blocked sites. It is a fair question, and one in which there are a variety of responses. Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the Federal Government imposed a legal requirement for schools and libraries obtaining funding under certain programs, such as E-Rate, to implement measures for protecting students from online content deemed harmful to minors. Internet content filtering software is a very common approach used by most K-12 schools to satisfy this CIPA compliance requirement–but it is not without limitations, nor is it the only approach.

There are a number of schools which have implemented more progressive policies toward accessibility of online content from sites containing a mixture of both educational material and inappropriate content. In lieu of blocking these sites through web filtering, these schools teach appropriate use, provide active monitoring of students’ internet logs, and impose disciplinary consequences for students who misuse the privilege. Although this approach may satisfy CIPA compliance, it is more the exception than the rule in American schools today.

Many schools simply do not have the staffing resources, or monitoring software, to adequately implement this progressive approach for keeping kids safe online. As a result, the vast majority of K-12 schools resort to filtering software, which usually targets the high level domain name of websites, such as “youtube.com“, and does not allow individual pages within that domain to be unblocked. Since web filters typically employ this “all or nothing” approach to filtering by domain name, sites are blocked for both teachers and students alike. Hence the dilemma behind the ISTE Tip to mirror the content on an unblocked site.

An alternate approach worth mentioning is to have your IT Department set up permissions groups in the system to differentiate levels of online access within your school. When configured this way, filters could allow teachers unrestricted access to online content for use in their classrooms, yet still provide the usual content blocking for students under a more restrictive permissions group.

Regardless of which approach your school takes towards addressing this issue, the important points to take away from the discussion are the need to teach students to be good digital citizens when using 21st Century technologies, and for educators to be good role models when using copyrighted digital media in the classroom.

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