PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG: March 2008 Archives

I attended the keynote at the 2008 TLT Symposium and found Professor Lessig's talk very thought-provoking. He showed many examples of remixed video/audio that would probably not pass muster under today's copyright laws. People have been doing this type of thing long before Al Gore invented the Internet, but the Internet just made them more easily accessible by many more people. Although I agree for the most part that these types of remixes should be protected as artistic expression, it made me think about what we really should be teaching our students at Penn State, particularly those who create videos with music at the Digital Commons. We have always played it safe and not allowed students to use copyrighted music in videos they display on the Digital Commons Web site, but I think the big concern is whether or not someone is profiting from the distribution of such works. If they are not profiting from their work, it should be considered creative expression and allowed to be featured. Prof. Lessig cited an example of a housewife who put a video of her 2 year old dancing with a song by Prince playing in the background. She was slapped with a takedown notice by representatives of Prince. While I question her choice in music, she in no way was profiting from Prince's music. If anything, YouTube was profiting from her use of Prince's music. They sell ads and whatever drives people to YouTube to watch videos is okay with them. So, I'm sure they're all for the use of remixes in videos they host. We are not in the ad-selling business, however, so this is not a comparable argument for preventing students from having their work featured on the Penn State sites. I think Professor Lessig's message warrants more discussion here at Penn State about what our policies should be regarding copyright and creative expression.

I attended a presentation by Bill Welch, Director of the Office of Disability Services here at Penn State, and he gave us some insight as to what his department does for students. It was very informative for me, as I really had no clue what all they did there. It also gave me a chance to show him something I've been working on on my own since last summer when we got a request from his office to make the LARCH 060 course accessible. We had transcripts, but they had to be listened to and massaged a bit so they matched what was actually recorded. Dave Stong captured the Flash animations as QT movies and we had Auto Synch Technologies create the text tracks that Dave then imported into the movies. I thought that it would be great if there were an easier way for us to do this in the future, so I started working on a little app to help with creating captioned movies. It came in handy with our Blended Learning course PHIL 12, where Dean Blackstock had to create text tracks for movies that were being delivered via Flash video. I was able to get the app to not only make QT text tracks, but also Flash XML text tracks for use with Flash CS3 video, which includes a new caption display component. So, the process for PHIL 12 worked something like this. Dean would use Dragon Naturally Speaking to get the bulk of the pre-recorded video content to text. He'd then listen to it and straighten out any errant words. These transcripts were just saved as text files. He could then import that text into the app and it would separate the text into separate captions. Then it was a matter of loading the movie and clicking a button as each caption is spoken. At the end of the movie you just click a button to create the Flash XML caption file. It can also create embedded QT caption tracks as well as several other formats. When I get the app a bit more complete I'll try to set up some kind of demo and perhaps get it on the lab machines for general PSU use. The app is Mac only, however, it will allow you to create SAMI text captions for Windows Media if you have the Flip4Mac plug-in on your Mac. Perhaps we can streamline the process for ODS to get accessible media to students.

A shortfall of the video iPod is that while it does support TV-type closed captions, it does not support text tracks for captioning, so the average Joe can't do it. And, if you do know how to embed a text track of captions into your QT movie, it will get stripped out when it goes to the iPod as well. I did find a workaround, however, if you need to display open captions on your iPod videos. The trick is to combine the video track with the caption track. After importing your caption text into the QT movie, all you need to do is to export your movie as MPEG-4. This will create a .mp4 file that will have a combined video and text track which works fine on video iPods.