Ownership of traditional courseware is vested in the faculty. In the digital forum, however, under the Copyright Act of 1976, case law, and institutional policy ownership may be vested in the institution.

Unforeseen forces are at work in higher education today. The purpose of this article is to explore the issues involved in the changing landscape. Decisions are and will be made that impact the intellectual property rights of faculty. It is important to be cognizant of the factors involved and alert to possible ramifications. The basics of the…

Copyright law is a source of a great deal of bewilderment and frustration to academic librarians. Beyond the basics of copyright protection and fair use, most librarians struggle to grasp the complexity of the law and the roadblocks it presents to access and use. This article attempts to elucidate some of those complexities by suggesting seven…

Librarians engage in some sort of negotiation all the time. Unfortunately, library schools do not uniformly teach negotiation theory or skills. New librarians are left to their own devices to self-educate, and self-educate they must. Most of the library-specific negotiation literature and continuing education opportunities focus almost entirely on…

Faculty develop intellectual property needed for online courses while employed by an academic institution. That institution has a claim on the copyright because the instructional materials developed by the faculty members could be seen as "works for hire." On the other hand, both tradition and case law have seen faculty as the copyright…

Consumers are inundated with sound and images. A child today may see more images in a week than an individual in the 19th century viewed in a lifetime. These images were presented in a read-only format throughout the 20th century. A child watching television was a passive observer. The inclusion of authoring programs such as iMovie and Movie Maker…

Intellectual property, which includes copyright, is an important legal concept for educators and other education professionals to understand. Intellectual property laws are designed to encourage the creation of original works, to stimulate creativity in society in general, and to protect and promote the creation and use of products of the human…

Advancement of knowledge and progress in technology drives the need for protecting inventions, new ideas, writings, music, and other media. While abundant, intellectual property and copyright issues are not simple, and the United States has adopted multiple rules via treaties worldwide. Academia has been fortunate with regard to the freedom…

When Lars Ulrich, drummer for the rock group Metallica, testified before Congress about his group's lawsuit against Napster in 2000, many people who followed copyright issues in the music industry were not surprised (Ulrich, 2000). Ever since downloading audio files became as easy as clicking a few buttons on a personal computer, charges of…

Claims that educational fair use is more permissive than most writing teachers and administrators realize. Presents four factors, suggested by the Copyright Act of 1976, which teachers and administrators should consider in order to make informed decisions about their practices. Lists 4 websites. (NH)

This study describes an investigation of the intellectual property policies of a stratified random sample of public and private Carnegie Doctoral Research-Extensive Universities. University policies were examined to determine whether or not they included provisions for distance education materials or courseware, what provisions were made for…

Contains two articles: (1) excerpts from testimony by the chairperson of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) regarding copyright law revisions; and (2) a statement by the Council on Library Resources (CLR) Board of Directors regarding the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights' report on copyright law and…

For many educators the fair use provision of the Copyright Act of 1976 and the subsequent Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act offer "carte blanche" use of various forms of media in the classroom. As Siva Vaidhyanathan (2001) notes, "Copyright myths have had as much power as copyright laws" (p. 5). The…

The author uses the example of a text a student was not allowed to display on his course Web site to explore how and why institutional ideologies particular to the historical development of composition and creative writing--especially when viewed in conjunction with current copyright law--render students' multimedia compositions illegitimate. He…

This research examines the copyright guidelines and policies from a purposeful sample of colleges and universities in the United States. It is a descriptive, qualitative study of 39 copyright and intellectual property policies and guidelines from these institutions. Compliance to the Teach Act of 2002 was the initial feature that this research…