OpenEd Researcher Badge: Proposed Research - Open Licensing

Many of the opinions expressed in the Open Licensing debate state there is a lot of ambiguity in the community about what actually constitutes fair use. A research project could be arranged that tests the public's notion of fair use. The project could be expanded to compare the outcome to those of copyright holders with the aim of discovering whether there is harmony between the opinions of the two groups.

Research setting - A series of remix videos from places like YouTube could be shown to people to see whether or not they think that copyright has been breached or if they think money should be paid. It would be important to have a spectrum of videos that show obvious breaches to some quite ridiculous ones (such as the one with the baby that Lessig shows). Some of the videos would have to be ones that copyright holders have demanded be taken down. The research could be conducted online with a series of videos with accompanying questionnaire.

Participants - A range of ages and nationalities would be preferred for further analysis.

Data collection - data would be collected via an online survey tool.

Analysis methodology - a minor statistical analysis would be done on the responses showing range, mean and median of positive and negative responses. Some further analysis could be done to show different opinions across age groups and nationalities.