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Copyright for Faculty & Staff

Copyright information for faculty & staff

Protecting Your Copyright

Copyright laws exist to give creators a way to seek legal recourse when their rights are infringed.  While these laws can add complexity to your educational practice, they also can assist when others are misusing your intellectual property.  Unfortunately,  due to the nature of many platforms hosting course materials, the onus is on the copyright-holder to locate their copyrighted material and request its removal from the website.

Below are some websites where course material is known to be posted by anonymous users.

Chegg

  • For profit company located in California, U.S.A
  • Offers physical textbook and ebook rentals for students
  • Homework help and academic file sharing service are known to be problematic
  • Chegg takedown request form

Course Hero

  • For profit company located in California, U.S.A
  • An online learning platform for course-specific study resources
  • Community populated material including past essays, test answers, etc.
  • Highly problematic business model
  • Course Hero is part of Learneo, Inc.
  • Course Hero takedown request form

StuDocu

  • For profit company located in Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • A student to student knowledge sharing platform
  • Provide students with access to free content in exchange to uploading their own content
  • StuDocu takedown request form

Best Practices for Teaching

  • Discuss copyright at the beginning of the term
  • Remind students that copyright is a crucial part of academic integrity
  • Include copyright information in your course materials
  • Use PDFs rather than Word Documents
  • Use interactive software through Canvas to provide testing
  • Let students know that their assignments are their own copyrighted work
  • Consider putting some material under an open licence

Best Practices for Research

  • Use a research agreement to articulate rights of contributors
  • Understand your author agreement with your publisher
  • Understand embargo dates and where you can deposit your work
  • Consider budgeting for open access publishing at the beginning of your research

Remember

  • Prevention is better than cure - removing content from the internet be can time consuming
  • Know your rights - refer to the Intellectual Property Policy in the Helpful Links section below
  • In most cases, student assignments belong to the individual student
    • You may make the question, but the response is belongs to the student
    • You need  to secure permission to use in publication

Policies and Procedures

Publishing Resources

Takedown Notice Template

If you find  your copyrighted material on a website or platform that does not provide a take down form, you will need to contact the website owners via email. Below is a template for you to use when requesting the removal of your material.

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