When digital video first streamed into schools, many predicted it would one day revolutionize teaching and learning. But the threat of lawsuits and new copy-protection technologies are keeping educators from exercising their legal right to use portions of video and other digital media in the classroom, warned scholars and legal experts at a June 18 summit.

"Knowledge Held Hostage? Scholarly Versus Corporate Rights in the Digital World," sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, sought to find a place for digital media under the provision of "fair use"--a hotly debated exemption in U.S. copyright law that permits researchers and scholars to reproduce selected materials for educational purposes without the permission of the copyright holder.

"Teachers and scholars are losing ground" in the fight to use digital media for educational or research purposes, American Library Association (ALA) copyright specialist Carrie Russell told eSchool News. Although educators, for the most part, are confident in their abilities to reproduce printed texts without fear of legal reproach, she said, they are more cautious when it comes to the use of digital materials, especially music and video clips, for fear that the slightest misstep might land them in court.

"With digital [media], people feel like they need to get permission," she said. What they often fail to realize is that the fair-use umbrella extends the same amount of protection to digital materials as it does to books and printed texts. "The law is technologically neutral," she said.

But, according to summit participants, it's more complicated than that. Educators and legal experts contend new technologies and lawsuits are creating uncertainty about what is exempt under the law. Despite what many believe is a legal right to make fair use of copyrighted material, the threat of litigation leveled by copyright owners and corporate heavyweights--led by the recording and motion picture industries--has forced university lawyers to weigh the educational benefits of the project in question with the potential long-term costs of a courtroom skirmish.

And even if institutions were in a position to stand up for scholars' rights, new anti-copying technologies ushered in under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) would preclude members of the academic community from taking advantage of favorable rulings handed down by the courts, said Peter Jazi, a professor at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C., and an expert on copyright infringement.

The result: "Aggressive copyright laws, often tied to companies' desire to protect intellectual property, are making the future of intellectual property precarious," said conference organizer Joe Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. "Horror stories abound about researchers unable to create innovative work under the idea of fair use."