This is all over the board

As you probably know lots of places are ripping DVDs

We are not at [redacted] but instead requesting streaming rights for a year or more

Some do say yes but costs average 250-500 for a year

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Look at the TEACH act amendment to the Copyright Act.

For online courses, you can’t show the whole film under fair use. The amendment will outline this.

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Sadly at [redacted] we don’t offer any such services (yet) though I am trying to make a case for the importance of offering a streaming file for DVDs and VHS films that we own in our collection and are otherwise unavailable to stream through educational licensing.

We do subscribe to Academic Video Online/AVON (Alexander Street Press) and that subscription offers a fair amount of internal/local storage, so in some cases we’ve purchased digital site licenses for films that we own in DVD but were unavailable during the early COVID days. Most of them came from Video Data Bank. We were able to take that file and host it safely for faculty and students through AVON. But your situation sounds very unique!

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Just a thought: upload the films to vimeo, use a password to access the films, then delete the films after the class/assignment/period established by the professor. They won’t be available to download on vimeo. 

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When I taught a film-heavy class at [redacted], I used dropbox to share the files with students. Because I had a business account through the college, they could stream the whole thing in dropbox and it was set to not allow downloads. The basic account, if I remember correctly, only allows a portion of it to be streamed.

Our college has also recommended that faculty can stream films in a synchronous session as long as it's not recorded. If the classes generally have screening time built in and are already doing synchronous things, that could be an option.

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It's certainly a dilemma! We've had instances of requests like this pop up quite a bit since quarantine hit. Our solution has been to digitize for faculty to share with their students, sharing via a Google Drive link that has downloading capabilities turned off. They can still share it on their course module system (we use Canvas, so I can't speak to Blackboard), but students cannot download it -- we've determined that this is fair use in our case, since it's for an educational purpose, and cannot be downloaded. We will cease to provide this service after the COVID-19 pandemic is over, whenever that is, since it is a bit of a precarious fair use claim. 

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So, this issue is totally what I am dealing with and would love to hear other librarian responses.

I have been doing two things:

1) I tell them to zoom (live stream) the movie in class. That appears to be okay after discussing it with a copyright librarian.

2) They make a copy, but only show the link within canvas. Destroy the copy. (this one is a little riskier)

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I'd recommend a great listserv that discusses these kinds of issues called videolib, https://groups.google.com/a/lists.berkeley.edu/g/videolib, you can look through the archives to see perspectives on this, or ask there-- there's a lot of very knowledgeable media librarians that contribute.

Because you mention MPAA, I'm thinking that a lot of these must be feature films that this professor is requesting. You probably already have, but I would very strongly recommend doing due diligence to see if streaming licensing is available for the films in question. Very likely, your library can use a platform like Swank to purchase streaming licenses for popular films, or Kanopy for other content, or New Day, Film Platform, so on and so forth. If you plug a film title into justwatch.com for example, you can also see if the proprietary platforms like Amazon or Netflix carry a film. If you can stream it legally, the library should not be ripping it. I've had to tell many instructors that if they're requiring this film, they are putting their students in the position of having to rent it on Amazon Prime or YouTube, or get a Netflix account, etc. (if the films are available there). That is up to them, and it usually costs less than your average textbook. But of course without knowing which films, I can't say if these services will work for you--and you probably already know a lot about this--I had to learn on the fly when I came into this position a couple years ago, so I apologize if I'm telling you things you already know. 

The advantage to Swank/Kanopy/New Day, etc. is that they host the content, you just set up IP authentication, so there's no chance of illegal downloads. Pricing varies with these platforms, and it's going to eat into your budget. Our school also has Media Space, which is also called Kaltura as a streaming platform (mostly for lecture capture, but we also occasionally purchase streaming rights to DVDs that we then rip and host there, but it's view only, students can't make a copy, and those are embedded in the LMS (we use D2L, but it would be the same in Black Board), so only registered students of the class can log in and see those. When/if the license expires, those films are suppressed and can't be viewed anymore. 

I hope that's helpful. A rapid move to all remote learning has definitely stretched our resources in different directions too--everyone needs digital now, but vendors and distributors aren't going to be so understanding as this goes on. It's hard to make room for a lot of streaming purchases in the budget at such short notice, but often you can find reasonable pricing, and sometimes you can go directly to filmmakers and distributors to work out agreements too. It's a lot of work!

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I was just dealing with a question like this one earlier today. It's a mess! The CUNY Copyright Committee just released a Fair Use and COVID guide that you might find helpful. The FAQs were drafted with input from CUNY's Office of General Counsel. 

The options are somewhat limited outside subscription streaming services and anything the library may have purchased with educational rights. The major streaming services have very restrictive user license agreements. Like you, I wanted to think it's a strong fair use case but I keep reading and hearing what I don't want to believe: user licenses with a streaming service supersedes a fair use argument. Maybe there is a case, but I haven't heard an expert make it yet. Maybe some risk-taking librarians and GCs are going to push this matter. 

But from the technical perspective, the prof. could use Blackboard Collaborate to stream video by sharing their screen. I've shared video and it works reasonably well.