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Copyrights of the Teaching Personnel How to Reach an AgreementThe unions do not recommend that their members make extensive and general transfer agreements of copyrights. What does the copyright cover? According to the law of copyright, a person, who has created a literary or artistic work, holds a copyright to that work. In order to come under copyright policy, a work must be independent and original. In practice, reaching the treshold of originality indicates that no-one else would have come to the same end result if they had entered into the same kind of artistic endeavor. Concerning teaching situations, copyright can be granted for instance to textbooks, network teaching materials or an oral presentation by the teacher in a lecturing situation. The copyright protects the manifestation or form into which the work has been brought. Consequently, a copyright does not apply to for instance ideas, knowledge, methods, plots, concepts or research results. It follows that anyone can write about the same subject, as long as it is performed in an original and independent way. The rights granted to the creator are divided into economic and moral rights. As the term indicates, economic rights are those rights which the creator may give away and thereby utilize economically. Moral rights always remain with the creator. They cannot be given away to a third party. The most central of the moral rights is the right to be acknowledged as creator, which means that the creator has the right to be mentioned as the author of the work as good manners presume. The economic rights of the creator present an exclusive right to govern the work by manufacturing pieces of it and bringing it within the reach of the audience in both altered and unaltered form. The work can be brought to the public by conveying it to them, by presenting it in public, by disseminating copies of the work within the public or by showing it in public. The creator is the actual person, i.e. human being, who has created the work. If there are several creators, they will all be considered creators. If the parts or sections produced by certain creators can be distinguished, each creator governs the part he or she has created. If the personal contributions of the creators cannot be separated, the use of the work demands the consent of all the creators. The law of copyright contains many restrictions to the copyright, which have an effect on the scale of the exclusiveness that the copyright grants to the creator. Among such restrictions are for instance the private use of the work and quoting. The right of the employer to use materials produced by a teacher The duty of a teacher is to teach and it is up to the teacher's own discretion whether he or she produces materials to support teaching or not. It is not the teacher's task to produce teaching materials for the use of others, so the right to use the materials produced by the teacher are not transferred to the employer on the basis of an employment relationship. There is a shortage of teaching materials on many fields. In addition, many teachers have changed over to network teaching. The fact that there is a lack of teaching materials, or that teaching is provided as network teaching, does not automatically result in the compilation of materials for others becoming a new area of duty for the teachers, though. The law of copyright contains a restrictive provision concerning the recording or saving of the presentation during teaching. This provision does, however, allow the teacher's presentation during a lesson to be recorded for use in teaching temporarily. According to the Copyright Council's definition of policy, this restrictive provision does not enable for instance the network saving of a lecture for permanent use in teaching. Neither does it allow the transmission of a lecture to a teaching group in another unit. This requires the consent of the teacher. The solution TN 2006:11 of the Copyright Council concerns the recording or saving of a university teacher's lecture and the transmitting of that lecture presentation to another teaching group within the same university. According to the Copyright Council's definition of policy, the allowing of the temporary use of a recording of materials in teaching allowed by the restrictive provision is not meant to broaden the teaching event out of the proportions that it has when delivered as a lecture by the teacher. If the recording is to be used more extensively than just as a temporary substitution in teaching, for instance via remote access or without it, this requires an agreement with the copyright holder. Extradition treaties of copyrights If the employer wishes to use teaching material produced by a teacher, this has to be agreed upon with the teacher in question. In the extradition treaty of copyrights, several issues are agreed upon: the scope of the right to use, the temporal scope of the agreement, possible commercial use of the material, meaning selling it on and the compensation to be paid to the producer. Unclarities can be avoided, if the employer and the employee compile a written agreement on the scope of authorization and compensation already before the employee begins to compile materials, the copyrights of which are to be partly transferred to the employer or some other parties. On the web pages of Ministry of Education and Culture there are contract models concerning copyrights in network teaching within education and research. Here is a link to the contract models: http://www.minedu.fi/OPM/Koulutus/artikkelit/koulutuksen_ja_tutkimuksen_tietoyhteiskunta/sopimusmallit.html Transfer agreements of copyrights concerning contract research have been under consideration in universities. Agreeing on the copyrights of the results of contract research beforehand is recommendable. The unions do not recommend that their members make extensive and general transfer agreements of copyrights. In these kinds of agreements, the employee hands over to the employer extensive rights to the results that are emerging at the moment or will emerge later in the project. This is done without compensation. Copyrights connected with contract research can be agreed upon separately with each project. This way, the employers are genuinely aware of what rights they are giving away and for what purpose. Where can teaching personnel obtain information of copyrights? More information on copyrights from the point of view of teachers can be found on the web: www.operight.fi. These pages constitute a part of the Operight-project funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture and IPR University. On the pages, you can find a copyright databank for teachers. The databank contains answers to teaching-related copyright problems (i.e. how books are to be used in teaching situations). The information can be found quickly and free of juridical expressions. The pages have been constructed from the teacher's viewpoint with the aid of practical example cases. text Sanna Haanpää
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