> if a faculty member develops a web page for their course, and does
> so on school equipment (and I assume everyone would be posting on the school
> web server, as opposed to a privately owned machine), then NIU has at least
> some claim to copyright on that material.
Nope. The webpage is the medium of distribution, like a class
handout, bulletin board, office door, or professional conference
presentation. Publishing on an NIU server doesn't confer to NIU copyright
claims upon the work that wouldn't apply to any other work, according
to copyright attorneys I've discussed this with.
> Even more complicated -- what happens when a teacher designs a course
> activity in which students create collaborative or individual web documents
> as a component of that course, and they do so on school machines during class
> time, directed by the teacher? As far as I can tell, all three parties (NIU,
> the teacher, and the student) hold some claim to the copyright of those
> documents.
The relationship between student/instructor could be sticky if the work
had significant commercial value. NIU would have no claim to a
collaborative effort, any more than it can claim a portion of the
revenue from a high-selling research monograph or challenge the copyright
claim of a journal where a scholar publishes research results.
Existing copyright law covers most of the "new" questions of
electronic publishing.
jt