On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Lyda Peters <lydap[_at_]aol.com> wrote:
>
> The college, on the other hand, asked for advice from their
> lawyers and were told that this work does belong to the college
> under "work-for-hire" copyright law.
University lawyers typically answer the faculty copyright question in this manner -- often ignoring the long-standing tradition of academic freedom as well as a number of court cases which might be said to establish an "academic exception" to the work-for-hire clause. However, one needs to look at is each particular university's particular faculty copyright policy. Some universities (like Stanford) have very clear policies that are careful to say that faculty retain copyrights. Other universities (like Purdue) have ambiguous policies. However, the problem right now is that, whether or not clear policies are in place, nobody seems to know whether/how existing copyright policy (often drafted years ago) might apply to digital media and online course materials (e.g., distance ed courses).
One distinction you have to be wary of, one that I keep running into: Universities will say that the faculty own the "content," while the University (or, in cases I'm familiar with, a corporate third-party) owns the server, or search engine, or software, or delivery mechanism that supports the course. The binary between content and form/delivery is of course a false one when it comes to deciding the status of a product that combines both. That binary doesn't solve the problem.
Here are some sources which might be of assistance:
Kulkarni, Sunil R. "All Professors Create Equally: Why Faculty Should Have Complete Control Over the Intellectual Property Rights in Their Creations." Hastings Law Journal 47 (1995): 221-252.
Lape, Laura G. "Ownership of Copyrightable Works of University Professors: The Interplay Between the Copyright Act and University Copyright Policies." Villanova Law Review 37 (1992): 223-269.
Patel, Sandip H. "Graduate Students' Ownership and Attribution Rights in Intellectual Property." Indiana Law Journal 71 (1996): 481-512.
Shores, Clark. "Ownership of Faculty Works and University Copyright Policy." ARL 189 (Dec. 1996): 27.
Simon, Todd F. "Faculty Writings: Are They 'Works Made for Hire' Under the 1976 Copyright Act?" Journal of College and University Law 9 (1983): 485-513.
Henderson, Albert. "University Ownership of Faculty Copyrights." Current Legal Issues in Publishing. Ed. A. Bruce Strauch. Haworth, 1996.
VerSteeg, Russ. "Copyright and the Educational Process: The Right of Teacher Inception." Iowa Law Review 75 (1990): 381-413.
Good luck with issue. I'd be interested in hearing how it turns out for you.
Jim Porter
email: jep21[_at_]po.cwru.edu
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