CLA have selected our school

[timbo343]

I didn't know where to put this as its to do with Copyright, but the CLA have selected us to take part in their data collection which is part of our county during the Autumn term.

 

I was wondering if anyone else has had this in the past and would like to know what they actually look for. I briefly spoke to the guy mentioned in the letter who outlined what would happen but im seeing if anyone has actually been through the process.

 

Apparently anything photocopied from a book with an ISBN number needs to be logged during the monitoring period and any content taken from free to view websites (non subscription based) and any images used from the net needs to be logged via with web logging tool. Can you imagine how many staff will forget to do this? I guess its a bit like referencing when you had to write your coursework back in the day.

[rich_tech]

IANAL up front here, but this has something for SLT to be dealing with written all over it to me

 

Theres a link on here to some internal survey stuff you may find useful - Copywatch :: Home - Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) : Home is their homepage for more information

 

That being said, is it in anyway a legal obligated process that's happening with your school or is this a voluntary undertaking ?

 

I ask as I don't know if they have any stat powers to enforce this on you, it sounds similar to me to what BSA used to do writing to a business I used to work for nigh on demanding that all software was in compliance and that we should audit regularly in case unpaid for software was in use (we were well within compliance as we were on a paid for SCO Unix/MS subscribed licensing as a software house with proprietary products)

Edited June 5, 2015 by rich_tech

[Linfit]

We had them in to do this about three years ago. For the copying, they gave us cardboard letterboxes to go next to each copier/MFD and a set of forms - staff were supposed to complete a form and post it in the box everytime they photocopied from a book. Someone from CLA came around every week to empty the boxes and take the responses away. I recall we had to create a shortcut to the web logging tool so that staff could log on-line their use of web resources, but that was about the extent of our involvement. I have no idea how comprehensive/complete the staff response was: we had no feedback afterwards. I suspect it was patchy, but I imagine if they get sufficient responses to make their sampling valid that's all they are bothered about.

[timbo343]

IANAL up front here, but this has something for SLT to be dealing with written all over it to me

 

Theres a link on here to some internal survey stuff you may find useful - Copywatch :: Home - Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) : Home is their homepage for more information

 

That being said, is it in anyway a legal obligated process that's happening with your school or is this a voluntary undertaking ?

 

I ask as I don't know if they have any stat powers to enforce this on you, it sounds similar to me to what BSA used to do writing to a business I used to work for nigh on demanding that all software was in compliance and that we should audit regularly in case unpaid for software was in use (we were well within compliance as we were on a paid for SCO Unix/MS subscribed licensing as a software house with proprietary products)

 

It's something that has come from county, the bursar saw me about it yesterday - I said after speaking to contact on the letter that this is going to be a whole school thing so it will mean a meeting with all staff.

 

We had them in to do this about three years ago. For the copying, they gave us cardboard letterboxes to go next to each copier/MFD and a set of forms - staff were supposed to complete a form and post it in the box everytime they photocopied from a book. Someone from CLA came around every week to empty the boxes and take the responses away. I recall we had to create a shortcut to the web logging tool so that staff could log on-line their use of web resources, but that was about the extent of our involvement. I have no idea how comprehensive/complete the staff response was: we had no feedback afterwards. I suspect it was patchy, but I imagine if they get sufficient responses to make their sampling valid that's all they are bothered about.

 

This sounds more or less what my contact was saying but you have given a lot more detail to how it worked. Did the web logging part apply to students too or was it mainly aimed at staff? I would hate to think that students have to log where they got all their images from.

[dhicks]

I was wondering if anyone else has had this in the past and would like to know what they actually look for.

 

Yes, we did this last year - it turns out to be a less onerous task than you'd think it might be. You get a cardboard post box and a stack of forms to put by each photocopier, and each time a teacher photocopies a page from a book they fill in a form and drop it in the postbox. As pointed out above, I imaganed staff taking ages to fill in a form each time, but the chap collecting the forms seemed quite happy with the dozen or so he used to find in each psot box per week, so I don't think they expect a massive amount. Same goes for the web-based form - asfter we'd made sure it was unblocked on our web filter and that staff had a short cut we didn't really have much to do with it again, as long as a few people fill it in that seems to be fine.

 

They are really just looking to judge the proportion of fees that go to each organisation they collect money for - the price of your CLA license won't change, but the proportion that goes to publishers / web-based resources / etc might change. As long as they have enough forms to give a rough idea of the propotions for each they seem pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

[SteveBentley]

That being said, is it in anyway a legal obligated process that's happening with your school or is this a voluntary undertaking ?

 

I ask as I don't know if they have any stat powers to enforce this on you, it sounds similar to me to what BSA used to do writing to a business I used to work for nigh on demanding that all software was in compliance and that we should audit regularly in case unpaid for software was in use (we were well within compliance as we were on a paid for SCO Unix/MS subscribed licensing as a software house with proprietary products)

 

I would imagine that it's part of the terms of your CLA license that they can audit you for compliance with the terms of it.

[dhicks]

I would imagine that it's part of the terms of your CLA license that they can audit you for compliance with the terms of it.

 

Assuming this is the same as we had last year then no, this is nothing to do with checking compliance, it is simply a usage survey. There is no checking of any resources in classrooms or files on the network, it's just some paper and electronic forms to fill in by staff when they use a photocopier or a resource from the Internet.

[Ant]

As @dhicks said, it's not a big a deal as it seems, and only fair to the authors and publishers of the resources we use.

 

We had this late last year and it really didn't cause us any issues. The bursar and I did think it was going to be a real PITA when we got the letter, but it really wasn't in the end.

 

As has been mentioned, they provide the boxes and labels, and the information required from staff is hardly taxing. We told staff if they weren't sure if something needed logging, just do it anyway. It's not a policing exercise and no one is going to be in trouble to copying something they shouldn't have for example.

 

I created a shortcut to the web logging page, whether or not this was actually used much I don't know. The CLA guy was happy for staff to update info in bulk they knew what they were going to do in a future lesson.

 

Main downside to all this was the ugly yellow boxes next to all of our copiers.

[Simcfc73]

We've been selected too.. woohoo.

 

My name got mentioned in the briefing this morning as someone to go to about it which is nice.