Students using downloaded music in I.T lessons

[farquea]

Our I.T lessons use Audacity and use commercial music in their projects. I'm fully aware they should be and that no mp3's should be stored on our servers that we do'nt have the license to. However the I.T teachers have pleaded that there is no way around it so i've told them that if students have 1 or 2 in their work area for their I.T work, then i will turn a blind eye, but if they have a crap load, well then it gets deleted.

As far as i can see i cant see an alternative solution without the sylabus changing in i.t lessons.

Does anyone else have this problem and how do you get around it? It's also the same for Music lessons, needing to use top 40 music to play or sing to etc.

[Domino]

Why can't they use creative commons licenced music?

[riffleman]

I've got the same problem, The kids however, wont listen to reason and insist on filling up the servers with tons of music.

My solution is to limit their folders. They can only save media type files in a certain folder and that folder has a 10Mb quota applied to it, so while they are saving music to the folder, its up to them how they manage it. Anything they need for their ICT lessons should only be small samples and I've been told that the files dont even need to be of a high quality, so they should be able to save a good number of samples. Not ideal, but it seems to work for us and the number of MP3 files saved has been drastically reduced.

[soveryapt]

Our I.T lessons use Audacity and use commercial music in their projects. I'm fully aware they should be and that no mp3's should be stored on our servers that we do'nt have the license to. However the I.T teachers have pleaded that there is no way around it so i've told them that if students have 1 or 2 in their work area for their I.T work, then i will turn a blind eye, but if they have a crap load, well then it gets deleted.

As far as i can see i cant see an alternative solution without the sylabus changing in i.t lessons.

Does anyone else have this problem and how do you get around it? It's also the same for Music lessons, needing to use top 40 music to play or sing to etc.

If I remember rightly from when I asked the question of the licensing people, so long as it is purely for educational purposes and will not be played in any public forum (so essentially, the pupil hears it, the teacher hears it, the examiner hears it and possibly the class hear it at the end of a lesson, but anything else is a public performance) then it's actually ok.

I'll see if I can dig out the official line I was sent on this. Obviuosly, this rules out playing the music created on an open/parents evening or something along a similar lines, and it can't be used in assembly or as part of a school production unless the permission has been obtained, and certainly under no circumstances can it be used outside of school.

The question then is how do you manage it? I like riffleman's suggestion of quota based limits, work with the teacher to find out how many that they would need and then put the quotas in place and see how it goes.

EDIT
Ok. I did it all verbal by the looks of it. Phone numbers I used being MCPS on 0208 378 7500 and PPL on 020 7534 1423. I was checking on the usage of different things and ensuring what licenses we had in place.

[Gibbo]

There's plenty of free and royalty-free MP3 music out there.

The teachers argument that the presentation about Justin Bieber then doesn't make sense if Bieber music isn't used, but to me that just reinforces the rules that they can't just go around plagiarising without thinking of the consequences.

The "blind eye" compromise we take is that if the project is entirely on the student's own USB stick.

[farquea]

ye i've told the teachers that if they store it on their usb stick then we really dont know/care about it but they still save them to their work area. but i was curios as to whether or not every school teaches the same material which ends up with audacity projects with pop music used in it.