[digital-copyright] MOOCs and Film Copyright

[Russell Poulin <RPoulin@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello -
I was participating in a MOOC on the study of Hollywood films.  Films were
assigned, but it was up to the students to find them on their own through
NetFlix, Vudu, YouTube, purchases, video stores, or however they could find
them.

A few people posted links to all the films both in the course's Discussion
Forum and in the unofficial FaceBook page that accompanied the course.  I say
"unofficial" because it was not sponsored by the university offering the
course nor the MOOC provider.   They used Google Docs as the vehicle for
distributing the films they uploaded.

Some of the films were silent films from 1929.  Those studios are now defunct
and my guess is that their copyrights had passed into the public domain long
ago.  The last two films were from the 1950s and 1990s and I'm sure that their
copyrights are in full force.

My questions...
-- Is there any responsibility or liability for the university or the
third-party MOOC provider for these links being publicly posted (and reposted
several times) on their official course website??  The university did not post
these links, they were posted by students.  Does the university or MOOC
provider need to monitor such activity?
-- What is Google's liability?  Are they allowing copyrighted material to be
posted on their applications?  I believe that a student tried to post a
copyrighted film onto YouTube and it did not last long.   The older films were
freely available on YouTube.  YouTube takes copyright very seriously.  How
about Google?

Thank you,
Russ

Russell Poulin
Deputy Director, Research and Analysis
WCET - WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies
rpoulin@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:rpoulin@xxxxxxxxx>
wcet.wiche.edu<http://wcet.wiche.edu/>
303-541-0305
Twitter:  wcet_info<http://twitter.com/#!/wcet_info/> and
RussPoulin<http://twitter.com/russpoulin>