Lesson Sharing Sites and Intellectual Property

Stephen Sawchuk reviews the legal rights teachers can surrender by posting to lesson-sharing sites . Sawchuk provides exerpts from various site licenses, some of which transfer the right of sale to hosting site.

Sawchuk notes that it is still unclear who ownes a teacher's lesson:

The 1909 [copyright] law establishing U.S. copyright policy made employers the owner of employee work products and carved out a special exemption for teachers. But in what some suspect might have been a drafting error, Congress deleted that exemption when it rewrote the law in 1976. (Section "Who Owns A Lesson?" para. 5)

To quote Sawchuk's conclusion: "In other words, dull and uninspiring though it is: Read the fine print."

-DD