Questions About Fair Use of Educational Tapes
 

I'm in the last stages of backing up 20 different Educational Tapes for an older gentleman at my employer. Neither of us are being paid for this service.

3 of the 20 videos are made by NUS TRAINING CORPORATION. This is where things get tricky.

I would like to put all 20 videos on the company shared drive so that older employees could watch them to refresh their memory on subjects without fear of punishment for "not already knowing" or "forgetting."

This should be fine for the 17 in house videos.

The 3 NUS Training Corporation videos are the problem.

I've having trouble determining if NUS is still around. I've find things like:

http://www.corporationwiki.com/p/hlh...ng-corporation
http://www.missouricorps.com/corp/1044525.html

I'm not a legal expert, but it looks like the name has expired and they no longer have website.

Also, assuming the company is still around, where does this fall in Fair Use? No one is making money off of the tapes. This is purely for education and preservation.

I would think the problem would be the argument is that by putting them on the shared drive, we are making copies.

Would it be ok to keep just 1 digital copy in the training room for preservation, and not put it on the shared drive?


Any feedback is appreciated. I'd really like to do the right thing and help as many people as possible at work learn if they have the desire.

I would look to see if they declared bankruptcy. If they dissolved it is possible the company transferred rights to the videos to another entity(ies). I don't know if I would have listed the name of the company here, but now that you have I believe it is okay as long as you have it on a personal drive and did not use any technology to circumspect DRM rules. Macrovision might fall under this, but I am not sure.

The question of the commercial impact of your copying comes into question. If the company is defunct and not trying to market their videos, it would be hard to claim that your act affected their sales of these videos. Can employees only watch the video on the company drive, or also download a copy?

Also, are you a non-profit? "Educational purposes" might be a bit more flexible here, but if not I could claim making copies of anything could be for the purpose of educating an audience. So this always such a good argument. Usually this is allowed in schools because an excerpt is being taken and discussed and criticized.

You can find out more from this site:

https://copyright.lib.utexas.edu/GSUcommentary.html