I want to start my blog with a question, “If a teacher leaves a school district, does the teacher get to keep the educational materials, like a lab worksheet, that he/she designed or is the property of the school district?” I had a colleague tell me that anything I create becomes the school’s property. I could find anything legal online so I thought maybe someone out there in cyber land might have a resource.
As far as copyright infringement, the following quote authored by Linda Starr from Education World (2010) really made me say “What!?!”
“Most copyright experts recommend this rule of thumb -- when in doubt, assume a work is copyrighted and ask permission to use it. Don't make the common mistake of believing that including quotation marks or a line of attribution satisfies copyright requirements. If you properly quote and/or credit a work's author, experts say, you cannot be accused of plagiarism, but you may still be accused of copyright infringement.”
I also found it interesting that the only reason we don’t hear about educators being persecuted for copyright infringement, and lets face it almost all teachers do it, is because the task force to fight the problem isn’t big enough (due to the lack of $$$).
I read the copyright policy on software and school use. The first thing that came to my mind was the fact that last year our building purchased several new textbooks. Because several teachers would be teaching multiple sections, our technology director made copies of the CDs that came with the single copy of the teacher resource material. Wow! I can’t imagine that he had permission to burn copies of that software.
The biggest piece of information that I now know about copyright law is that you need to ask permission when you’re not sure if it’s copyrighted.
If you’d like further information on copyright infringement, specifically copyright law and technology, check out Starr’s article here. Hope I didn't infringe on the copyright laws.
That’s a really interesting point about the school owning what you had created while working there. I guess it would make sense, I just hadn’t thought about it. I have talked in a few of my blog posts about my fear of using some of these web tools such as Slideshare because I’m sure many of the images in each of my presentation are copyrighted.
ReplyDeleteI think the real reason teachers aren’t prosecuted for copyright infringement is because in most cases the teachers aren’t making a profit from using the image. I guess in the case of the CD copying there would be a financial impact, so all bets are off.
I do know some teachers unions are working on language to protect the intellectual property of teachers who create curriculum materials and share or post them.
ReplyDeleteSince I'm not a lawyer I won't make any assertions or give any advice but I think in most cases, the district has a right to the intellectual property if their time or equipment was used in the generation of the materials. NPR had an interesting story on it a few months back.