Copyright Scenarios

As a normal part of her work, a university professor creates course materials to teach a new course. Later, she moves to another university and decides to use the same course materials to teach the course at her new institution.

Is this violating copyright?

U.S. copyright law gives rights of ownership of works-for-hire to the employer. Because the creation of new course materials could be considered among the normal duties of a university professor, it is possible that such works would be considered a work-for-hire and so the university could claim copyright on them. In other words, it may be a copyright violation for a professor to use materials created at one institution to teach a course at another. However, several court opinions have held that the university professors should not be considered employees in regard to work for hire. This is in line with the academic tradition of allowing professors to retain copyrights for scholarly works or other materials they create. It should be noted, however, that most of these court opinions were established before the Copyright Act of 1976 and it is unclear whether this tradition will remain intact under the new Act .

Because ownership and copyright of online course materials and other potentially valuable material has become increasingly important, and because there is a legitimate question regarding who owns such materials, the best course of action for both faculty and universities would be to define ahead of time who will retain copyrights of materials.

For an excellent article published by the Pew Learning and Technology program titled “Who Owns Online Courses and Course Materials”, click here. (Note: the section that relates specifically to copyright law starts on page 23)

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