What copyright and ownership issues arise in distance education?

Institutions can take several possible approaches to copyright issues:

• Copyright in course materials may be assigned to the faculty members who develop them.
• Institutions commissioning materials may retain sole rights.
• Institutions may retain rights but provide for royalty payments to the developers.
• For materials developed collaboratively, one institution or all the collaborating institutions may hold copyright.

Whichever approach is chosen, it is vital to ensure that the institutional policies are clearly stated and consistently administered.

Copyright and ownership are primarily an institutional concern. But the trend toward institutions' delivering distance teaching programs outside the region where they reside increasingly makes this a national or even an international issue.

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