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Material that you create for your classroom belongs to you, right?

Not necessarily.

I'm a composer. I was a professional musician for years, and still actively write music. Trust me when I say I'm a pretty darned staunch advocate of intellectual property rights. In my current capacity as a teacher leader, I'm an absolute stickler for proper citation and giving credit where credit is due... and I still believe in both of those things where teachers' work is concerned.

But the question of "property" is one of legality, and that inevitably makes this question more complicated.

According to the Federal Copyright Act of 1976, materials created by teachers to be used in the classroom to teach the county curriculum are generally considered "works for hire," and therefore those resources are the property of the school division. According to the National Education Association (NEA), there are three major criteria that are historically utilized by a court of law to determine whether or not intellectual property is a "work for hire."

1. Did your job duties include creating the material?
2. Did you create the material on school time or with school equipment?
3. Did you create the material to assist or serve the school?

If your principal directs you to develop something, and it's within the scope of your duties, the county owns the material for sure. But if it's not a direct order, the logic gets a little fuzzy.

Say you sit at your desk during a planning period and create a PowerPoint presentation teaching the Pythagorean Theorem, and you post it to SchoolFusion. Another teacher in Texas downloads it after hearing awesome things about it from a mutual friend and uses it, unchanged and unedited, in her own classroom. Did that teacher violate your rights?

As a general rule, most teachers seem to ask the question "who cares?" However an increasing number of teachers do care, and that mandates a more authoritative answer: As a general rule, the law says no, the teachers' rights were not violated. The question to ask is whether or not the teacher violated the rights of Prince William County, because that's who really "owns" that PowerPoint. If you develop materials sitting at your desk at school, on county time, you're working and being compensated for that work, and the materials you produce are contained within the scope of what the county is paying for... and therefore, the school owns that material.

I put a call in to the office of the Associate Superintendent for Instruction in a Virginia school division, and she confirmed that the county agrees with this interpretation of the law. "If the materials are created during school hours then the [owner] is the School Division," her secretary wrote. "If the teacher prepares [the material] on the outside and brings [it] in, they should have it copyrighted prior."

And that is the next ball of wax. While the Copyright Act does put a strike against the teacher when it comes to making material at work, it also puts a plus in the teacher's win column when it comes to copyright. It's called "Copyright Upon Creation."

Most people don't have a clue what copyright is. Copyright is literally the rights to the material, and whoever creates a piece of original material legally owns those rights, even if they didn't register the copyright.

That's what an official copyright is, done through the Copyright Office. It's simply a registration of your material and a standard by which your legal rights can be measured and made publicly accountable. However, if I write a piece of music and someone shamelessly steals it, calls it their own, and goes off to perform it for money and not pay me royalties, that person broke the law regardless of whether or not I registered my music beforehand.

There's an old adage in the music industry that the cheapest copyright available is mailing yourself the copy of music. A Post Office cancellation mark is a federally-binding document, and if the envelope is sealed, it's (according to urban legend) a fool-proof way to win a court case on the matter. (If you're serious about copyrighting... may I suggest just doing it the right way through the Copyright Office.)

However, the lesson we take away from this is the same: If you own the rights, you don't need to register your copyright, and according to the Copyright Act, if you develop that material outside of school and outside of your contract hours, you personally own the rights, not the school. By the way, because the law was written in 1976... to be legally safe, you really want to print out your material. A hard copy is essentially the cornerstone of your legal rights to material you created.

These two major benchmarks answer many aspects of the question, but there's always a gray area. Let's take BattlefieldTeachers.com as another example. I worked tirelessly on that material, and did some of it on county time, with county resources, to serve the county. But what about the huge sections I did at home, on my own computer? Now the law is fuzzy and up for interpretation, and in fact some of the administrators I've talked to about this were of the personal (read: off-the-record) opinion that the website would be wholly my property as the author regardless of where or when I did it because it's so far afield of the expectations of my job. In the case of my IGPro instructions, for example, the actual instruction wording was done largely at school for Interim 1 and Marking Period 1... but all of the other marking period instructions I edited from the original at home. Does that mean two of the eight are the school's and the rest are mine? What about the fact that most of the graphics, layout, design, and the actual HTML was done at home? Does that mean some of the text is the school's, but the webpages and design are mine? Can one exist without the other?

It's a tough question with tougher-to-find answers, but at the end of the day a lot of it boils down to professional courtesy. When I talked to my principal, Amy Ethridge-Conti, about teachers' intellectual property, she made an astute statement about the notion of teachers fighting about property rights to teaching material: "It seems to me that it runs counter to what we're trying to do as educators." I tend to agree; I find it hard to believe that two professional educators wouldn't want each other's students getting the very best education they can... but it also occurs to me that some of this has to do with professional courtesy.

Professional courtesy and legal property rights are two different things.

I'd like to suggest a few major guidelines. Firstly, as an author, you should always put your name, your school, and some form of contact on the title slide or page of anything you create. It's just good practice and the mark of someone who takes pride in his/her work. Secondly, make sure you're paying the same respect to others that you expect by citing your sources in any work. Clipping a six-point-font note to the bottom footer of a worksheet isn't as crazy as it sounds in this day and age, nor is including a "works cited slide" at the end of a PowerPoint. As a user of information, if you find a great resource online that someone else developed... preserve the title page or name on the document. If you want to use a worksheet another teacher designed, sure you might want to add your name for your kids' reference, but you owe that other professional the courtesy of leaving his/her name on it as well. After all, would you expect any less from a student writing a paper? I know that I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of someone taking BattlefieldTeachers.com, downloading the whole thing, rebranding it with their school logo, and throwing it up at SomeOtherTeachers.com. However... I have to keep telling myself a few important things. First of all, I'm a teacher, and my goal is to educate, and if a second source of the information I created is going to help my colleagues here or abroad, shouldn't I support that? Secondly, I get paid in part to create resources. Can I really claim it as my own sovereign material if it's something the county effectively paid for?

At the same time... shouldn't I retain the rights to take that resource with me if (perish the thought) I ever left PWCS? After all, it was far above and beyond the baseline call of duty to create all of that, let alone pay for it and host it out of pocket.

I'd like to think that the majority of this discussion could be mitigated through professional courtesy and proper research and citation methods.

Here's the bottom line for you bottom-line people: If you make something at school during school hours, your work belongs to the school. If you make something at home during your own time, your work belongs to you. Regardless of where you made it, it's fair to expect that others respect your work and give you credit, and it's your responsibility to extend the same courtesy to others.

Copyright

© 2006-2008, Keith David Reeves. All rights reserved. Reproduction and/or distribution not permitted without the express written consent of the author.

MLA Citation

Reeves, Keith David. "The Way Up: Leadership, Awareness, and Data in Integrated Education." 1 Oct 2007. KDReeves.com. . <http://www.kdreeves.com/art_wayup.html>.