Thursday, October 06, 2005

What about closed content?

This will be a real quickie tonight. I've had some conversations with Librarians here about doing eReserves via Podcasting, but that means folks outside the campus community have to be blocked from accessing the content, for intellectual property reasons, and perhaps some Digital Rights Management is applied to the content so it can not be redistributed, to make the Fair Use case stronger or to appeal to the TEACH Act. The question I want to ask here is whether the end user can be using the same podcatching software in this case. They'd obviously prefer that. Is there any chance that it can become a reality?

1 comment:

Burks said...

Lanny - Well, that's the problem with podcasting - the student actually downloads a copy of the MP3 file to her computer, and possibly also to her iPod. The user gets a copy - which then could be distributed elsewhere. This is a fundamental difference between podcasting and streaming, since with streaming, the user never saves a copy of the audio stream.

-- Burks (from Ann Arbor, MI)

PS - Sorry to hear about the Yankee's loss last night!