Intellectual Property
Key Points
- Obtain agreement that OpenCourseWare is premised on making materials available to end users under "open" license terms that allow use, reuse, adaptation, and redistribution.
- Preserve faculty rights of their course materials to allay faculty concerns.
- Develop a sound copyright review and clearance process, and build awareness around intellectual property requirements. Faculty often use third-party materials in teaching; these materials must be cleared for publication with copyright owners, or removed. This is a manageable process.
- Ensure that permissions from third parties are compatible with the open terms of OpenCourseWare publication. Commercial publishers are least likely to grant liberal license terms, but there are alternatives.
There are three dimensions of intellectual property (IP) considerations for OpenCourseWare:
Getting permission (a "license") from faculty or other contributors of course materials to publish them on OpenCourseWare |
Consideration of ownership is likely to start with your institution's overall policy addressing whether the faculty own the copyright to course materials they author or whether the copyright is retained by the institution. If the faculty does own the course copyright, then to publish a course it will be necessary to get permission through an appropriate license in order to publish their materials on your OpenCourseWare site.
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Clearing (or removing/replacing) embedded third-party elements from materials to be published |
An OpenCourseWare project is designed to freely and openly publish academic course materials on the Internet for non-commercial educational purposes. From a copyright standpoint, this raises a number of issues, including:
- The implications of putting course materials in a location and format that is publicly accessible, rather than being restricted to use within your institution's educational process.
- The likelihood that many of your faculty routinely incorporate third-party elements in their course materials under "Fair Use" rules. These materials can range from specific diagrams or images to complete readings extracted from a textbook. These will require IP clearance in order to be published.
In building your IP clearance process, you will need to finalize your overall IP goals. The focus of the IP clearance process is to ensure that your OpenCourseWare honors the rights of original authors/contributors and owners of copyrighted materials, both within and outside your institution according to the agreed upon licensing strategy. |
Granting a license to OpenCourseWare end-users to use, reuse, adapt, and redistribute materials for non-commercial educational purposes, in accord with the OpenCourseWare concept |
The underlying premise and purpose of OpenCourseWare is to make course materials used in academic settings freely and openly available to others for non-commercial educational purposes.
Based on the specific goals of your OpenCourseWare project, you should decide what terms of use you would allow for end-users and where appropriate, develop an end-user license for the materials published on your OpenCourseWare site. For a more in-depth understanding of copyright law and open licensing strategies, visit the Creative Commons Web site. |
The IP process may feel daunting, but it is manageable.
Note: This section explains general rules and guidelines as they apply to OpenCourseWare. It is not an exhaustive review of copyright law or other IP considerations. Specific questions and special circumstances that may not be answered here should be referred to appropriate intellectual property counsel.
