development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> Through creating http://www.esolpc.com/teacherhost (using ccHost) a site
> where teachers can share educational materials online with one another and
> utilize Creative Commons licensing http://creativecommons.org as a means
> of protecting/sharing their creative works...I have run across an issue I
> hadn't fully considered regarding schools claiming ownership over
> educational materials...
>
> Should Public School Systems be able to claim copyright ownership over
> lesson plans or other educational materials created by teachers (why or
> why not)?

Well, I can imagine that some teacher's boss is got a "empire building"
mentality going on and wants to claim ownership of anything the teachers
create. Whether they can do that or not, I'm not sure.

If your site were taking contributions from private sector employees,
this would come down to whatever Employee Agreement they signed when
they got hired by their boss. Often, folks have to sign over the
rights to anything they create that is remotely related to their job,
whether they create it on the job or at home, and this might even
extend to a year after the employee leaves the company.

I don't know if teachers have similar clauses in their Employee
Agreements or not. You might want to ask some of your teachers
if they could send you a copy of their contract, and then look
for anything about assigning copyright to the school.

I'm also not exactly sure how the law views works created by
Public School systems. I'd *think* that such works should
immediately go into the Public Domain, but I think this might
be something determined by state law, rather than federal law,
so results may vary.

Maybe you could try contacting the State Board of Education in
your state and try to get some free information about how the
system works in your state. Worse that would happen is they
are useless and you're out the cost of a phone call.

But I'd try the cheap approaches first before getting to the
point of hiring a lawyer, or trying to find one who will answer
your questions pro bono.


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