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Lecture protection: The San Diego Faculty Association 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 web-site postings, etc., we recommend that you put on the bottom of each page a statement such as the following: Copyright [your full professorial 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/chapter--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. We discourage faculty members from including the Regents of the University of California as co-copyright holders because we believe that doing so may compromise ownership rights which faculty currently enjoy under California State Law. According to the California Legislative Counsel: "Existing case law provides that in the absence of evidence of agreement to the contrary, a teacher, rather than the institution for which he or she teaches, owns the common law copyright to his or her lectures," and inclusion of the Regents in a copyright statement certainly could constitute "evidence of agreement to the contrary." The SDFA would like to recognize and thank the staff and officers of the UC Davis Faculty Association--Myrna Hayes and Dr. Charlie Nash, in particular--for their lobbying efforts to secure passage of AB 1773, as well as for the valuable advice and information that they have passed along to us on these and related matters pertaining to the protection of faculty courseware. ©2005 California Conference
of the American Association of University Professors |