Want to show movies on campus? Know about copyright!

Sometimes, a thought-provoking movie or video can be the best education. Professors have used movies for educational purposes for a long time and even at IT we showed a documentary last year to provide an opportunity for discussing data privacy. 

However, even with the best intentions, there are some things to consider before showing a movie on campus. First of all, it is important to understand the difference between a private and a public showing.
Purchasing, renting, or borrowing a DVD, videotape, or electronic copy of a movie grants you the right for a private viewing of this content. This means you can watch it with a group of your friends and family in your home and not violate the copyright of the movie. It does not, however, give you the right to show it publicly. 

A viewing is considered public if it meets either of these two criteria:

• You are showing the movie in a place that is open to people other than members of your family or a small group of your friends (i.e. in a classroom, commons areas, conference room).
  
• You are showing the movie to people other than members of your family or a small group of your friends. 

If your planned event includes the public viewing of a movie, here are six ways you can show a movie without violating copyrights:

• rent the movie from an authorized distributor, i.e. Swank Motion Pictures, Inc.
• show a movie that is on the public domain
• for an ESU audience, stream from Kanopy (a service of the ESU library)
• show a legitimate copy of the movie as face-to-face teaching activity (including a discussion at the end)
• stream movies designated as "educational screening" from Netflix 
•  contact the owner of the movie (usually the production company) and receive written permission for your showing

For more information, consult our Official Guidelines or view the Printable Handout and always feel free to contact the IT Security team with questions!

myIT Tip of the Week

myIT Tip of the Week

Welcome back!  We hope the spring semester is off to a good start for you.  Here in IT, we were very busy during the Winter Break working on labs and classrooms, and various other maintenance projects. 

One thing we are excited about is our new Chat feature.  When you visit our home page, emporia.edu/it, you will see a pop up chat window in the lower right corner of your screen.   Whenever the Help Desk staff is online, you will be able to chat with them about any IT questions or issues you may be having. 

 The pop up looks like this:

If the Chat window indicates we are offline, you may submit a message, and we will respond as soon as we are back online.

In addition to calling or emailing us, we are pleased to be able to offer this new, alternative to contacting the Help Desk.  Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

 

Yes, these phones really are that good

2017 was a big year for phones. The iPhone X came out, the Google Pixel 2 came out, and the Galaxy Note 8 came out. And for those of us that are relatively behind on the big tech crunch and are out of the loop with all the big tech details, that just means the major phone companies released some pretty great technology. Last year there was heavy pressure from companies to produce better-than-ever cameras and that is exactly what they did. IT has access to a Pixel 2XL that we have been using for some of our media and we've been loving the photos that it's producing. We won't really go into too much of the technical details on how these camera's are doing well, but it has a lot to do with some pretty cool software processing. These photos are turning out so good that IT is using them on their website projects, and we can't tell the difference on our high resolution monitors.

For those of you on campus who love photography and don't want to drop ten thousand dollars on a good camera, maybe consider one of these phones for your next upgrade. You'd be amazed at what type of photos you'll take with something that fits into your back pocket. Below are a few samples taken by myself on campus and on road trips, and you might have seen several others taken with the Pixel 2XL on some of our websites. Enjoy the photos!

-Warrick Rodgers
IT Student Web Developer

Variety is the Spice of (a Browser’s) Life

The history of web browsers is a mixed one that has ranged from the “wow” factor of Netscape Navigator to the rise of Internet Explorer to the debut of today’s modern options.  Choice is key as most browsers have shifted towards a web standards-based experience, though certainly not in totality.  Features range from a sleek user interface, tabs, built-in customizations, private browsing, faster page loading, synchronized settings and many more.  Internet Explorer’s age is now glaring as Microsoft goes all-in on its blue “E” cousin Edge.  Chrome’s dominance becomes its own threat as web developers forget (or never experienced) the era of building content exclusively for Internet Explorer and now seem poised to repeat the mistake with Google’s offering.  The once powerful Firefox has waned in recent years, only to strike back with a flashy new version late in 2017 that not only introduced a new browsing engine under the hood, but also a new look and design.

Traditionally, some ESU systems “work better” with certain browsers and some don’t work at all.  In general, however, ESU faculty, staff and students can use the browser of their choice.  The most important aspect is that browsers are continuously update and patched to avoid any security or operational bugs that are discovered.  Our metrics show that Chrome is our most-used browser with ESU systems, but IE, Edge, Firefox and Safari are not too far behind.
 

So, what do I use?  Edge has been my default since, but I’m giving the new Firefox a try.  Many of my content creation tools require a browser, which means the browser I’m using becomes a resource hog on my PC.  In looking at the new Firefox, I’m evaluating how it handles memory utilization as I open multiple tabs, each using large web applications.  So far, performance has been on par with Edge.

Which browser do you use?

-Brian Osbourn, Director, IT SCS