Lecture Protection

The California Conference of the AAUP urges its members to take a few simple steps to safeguard the original material which they distribute to their classes in tangible form. For such materials as syllabi, original problem sets and solutions, course website postings, etc., we recommend that you put on the bottom of each page a statement such as the following:

Copyright [your full professional name], [year]. All federal and state copyrights reserved for all original material presented in this course through any medium, including lecture or print.

We further recommend that faculty members who are distributing a substantial amount of original material--lab manuals, drafts of papers/chapters--formally register those copyrights. This is a relatively simple and inexpensive ($30) process which simplifies matters should it prove necessary to prosecute a copyright infringement. Forms and instructions for registering a copyright are available on the Library of Congress website.