Who Owns Your Lesson Plans?

According to the copyright law, media specialists may be in for a surprise

By Carrie Russell -- School Library Journal, 2/1/2006

Can teachers download Web images for their PowerPoint presentations without worrying about breaking the law? —Liz Ketelle, library media specialist, Golden Sierra High School, Garden Valley, CA

Yes, they can. Section 110(1) of the copyright law allows teachers and pupils to make copies for public display in the classroom for teaching purposes. The images must be used strictly for nonprofit, educational purposes in the face-to-face classroom.

Who owns our lesson plans—the school or the instructor? I assumed that they were owned by the school. But after reading Section 102(b), I wondered if lesson plans fall into the category of items (such as ideas) that aren’t protected by copyright. What about books that are collections of lesson plans? —Cheri Dobbs, middle school media specialist, Detroit Country Day School, Beverly Hills, MI

The school holds the copyright on lesson plans because its employees created them as part of their job. If a teacher created lesson plans during nonwork time, she would retain ownership. In higher education, some universities have allowed their faculty to hold the copyright on their lessons or have worked out an arrangement where the instructor retains some rights. Several years ago, faculty ownership of course materials became a hot topic, because faculty were creating online courses that the university could, if it chose to, ask other instructors to teach. Conversely, a professor could leave University A for a job at University X and use the course materials he had previously created. To deal with these potential conflicts, many institutions created faculty ownership policies.

Lesson plans are protected by copyright if they are sufficiently original and creative—and fixed in a tangible medium. Lesson plans do not fall under Section 102(b) because they are usually more than a list of instructions. They are creative expressions that go beyond just “ideas.”

Books that are a collection of lesson plans may be protected by copyright in two ways. Each lesson is a protected work and together they form a collected work. If the selection and arrangement of the lessons included in the collection are creative enough, the entire work may meet the requirements of a protected compilation—with the copyright held by the compiler. The compiler, however, would not have copyright over the preexisting lesson plans and would need to get permission from the original authors to reprint them in the compilation. If another author contributes a new creative and original addition to the compilation—critiques of the lesson plans, for example—she would hold the copyright to that small piece of the collection.

To save our students from having to lug around heavy backpacks, our teachers thought of a clever solution: make PDFs of the texts. Students would still use their textbooks at home, but at school, they would use the online PDFs to access their “books.” Also, each student would still be required to buy the textbook. We would copy the PDFs one chapter at a time, and only the current chapter would be available to students. Would we be violating the copyright law? —Joyce Roby, library director, Head-Royce School, Oakland, CA

If each student has purchased her own textbook, I think the copying is a fair use. We are always reminded that copying an entire work is almost always cause for concern, but in this case, the PDFs aren’t taking the place of book sales and access to the copies is limited to students who are enrolled in the course. I would label each PDF copy with its own copyright notice (“c” in a circle) and include a warning that further copying could be an infringement of the copyright law. You are correct to block access to the chapters after they are no longer needed. If the same textbooks are required for another group of students the following year, the PDFs can be made accessible again, but make sure you use a new password.