Re: Educational Courses

>>> jcarsrud[_at_]san.rr.com 12/14/01 10:40AM >>> wrote:
I work for a small business that writes educational courses for nurses. We currently have 20 courses none of which are copyrighted. How do we go about copyrighting them? Also we are planning on putting these on the web and selling them in a .pdf format. If we copyright our web stuff is our hardcopy stuff automatically copyrighted? <<<<<

"Educational courses" cannot be copyrighted in the abstract; see 17 U.S.C. §102(b) ("In no case does copyright protection ... extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated or embodied ..."). But written materials for educational courses are subject to copyright.

All written materials are automatically granted copyright protection as soon as they are written down, but you may wish to register your copyrights with the copyright office. The registration fee is currently $30 per work. Forms and information are available on the copyright office web site, http://www.loc.gov/copyright/

If the content of the website and the hard copy is the same, both will be protected by a single registration. It is also a good idea to include copyright notice: Copyright © Date of first publication, and name of author. If all of the authors are employees, the company owns the copyrights; if some of them are contractors, its gets tricky and you should hire a copyright lawyer to determine ownership.

Tyler T. Ochoa
Associate Professor
Whittier Law School Received on Fri Dec 21 2001 - 17:41:03 GMT