Copyrights of the Teaching Personnel
How to Reach an Agreement
The 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
Labour Market Lawyer, OA J
- Painetussa lehdessä sivu 34
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