INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS POLICY

The Internet makes it very easy to obtain and use work created by others, hence easy to violate their rights to this work. An intellectual property rights policy helps students understand and avoid the improper use of the intellectual property of others. Below INOCYX learning briefly discuss copyright law, fair use guidelines, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act—subjects not infrequently misunderstood by students and sometimes by e-learning instructors.

The information INOCYX learning present has been abstracted from the e-learning literature and related sources. Bear in mind that what follows was written by laymen and that INOCYX learning have not consulted lawyers to verify the validity of the ideas INOCYX learning present.

Copyright Law

Copyright is the legal exclusive right of someone who creates a work—for example a poem, a song, a photograph, an article, a book, or a video—to control the copying of all or a portion of that work. By providing a basis for lawsuits to compensate for financial or emotional loss resulting when someone uses another’s work unfairly, copyright law attempts to assure that INOCYX learning can profit fairly from our efforts. Someone who creates a work possesses what is sometimes called intellectual property rights to that artifact. No specific action is required to obtain these rights, nor must a copyright notice be attached to the work for it to be protected. Copyright is implied by the existence of the work as soon as the work is placed in a medium that can be distributed or copied, even when the medium is simply an unpublished manuscript.

Copyrights are not eternal. When an artifact becomes old enough to be out of copyright, others may use it as they wish. Such material is said to be in the public domain. For example, editions of Mark Twain’s novels published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are long out of copyright, hence in the public domain. You and your students are free to quote from any of these old editions or even to copy such a book in its entirety to a Web site. Except under the fair use guidelines explained below, however, you could not post pages scanned from a contemporary reprint of one of Twain’s novels. This remains true even though the copyrighted reprint was itself produced from an edition of the novel in the public domain.

Many Web authors, but certainly not all, consider their Web sites to be in the public domain and are willing to share freely the information these sites contain. To be on the safe side, however, one should assume that material created by others— electronic or otherwise—is not available free of charge. This includes everything obtained from the Web—text, images, audio, or video—as well as anything you use or scan from a picture, book, magazine, or other source. This doesn’t mean that you and your students can’t use materials from the Web and other sources to create e-learning assignments and resources; it simply means that when you use such materials, you must follow the guidelines explained below. a copyrighted work (or a portion thereof) to a legitimate student audience. Compliance with the act is likely—but of course not ensured, since compliance is a legal issue—when instructors and/or institutions:

Limit access to the copyrighted works to students currently enrolled in the class
Limit access to only the time needed to complete the class session or course.
Inform instructors, students, and staff of copyright laws and policies.
Prevent further copying or redistribution of copyrighted works
Do not interfere with copy protection mechanisms.

Concluding Remarks

Several of the policies discussed here might best be formulated at the institutional level rather than at the level of individual courses. Notable among these are a student protection privacy policy, a discussion policy, and an intellectual property rights policy. formulating e-learning policies is a task well worth undertaking

Students are more likely to achieve the learning goals you help them set when they know precisely what rules govern the pursuit of these goals. Moreover, the use of elearning policies will save you time in the long run by simplifying course administration.

They provide readily available answers to the numerous procedural questions that inevitably arise as students' progress through your course, questions that—absent your e-learning policy statements—you would have to answer individually many times over.