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Ask Slashdot: Which License For School Products?
Reader TheodoreQSwiss breaks onto the page with this question: "The independent school where I serve as Dir. of Technology is in the middle of reworking their employee handbooks and would like to include a section on ownership of the intellectual property produced by employees of the school while doing work for the school. Ideally, both the school and the creator(s) would be able to retain rights to the use of the product. Do you have any recommendations on licenses that would support both parties involved?"
ask a attorney or the school legal contact.
And what of the tax-payers who funded it?
If you created it while on the clock for the public, the public should own it.
THL phish sticks
Creative Commons *is* a copyright license.
This is how you copyright a work: write it. Done!
Now no one can distribute it without your permission (except as allowed by fair use). You can give them permission to use it in certain ways using a new or pre-existing license, like CC (or GPL). There is no "conflict" between copyright and creative commons; quite the contrary, CC depends on (C). The GPL does too, as RMS has pointed out more than a few times.
If you think big money can be made for the school and the creators by selling copies of this work (which is often NOT the case), then my recommendation would be to have the school be the copyright owner (it will be by default given that its employees are doing a work-for-hire), that the school enters with the employees a contract for sharing the royalties (meaning that e.g. if the school sells the rights for printing a book, it will give a certain fraction of the royalties to the author), and that the school releases the work under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC) license.
If, on the contrary, you believe no one will make much money by selling this work, then you can have the author release the work under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license indicating that the attribution should be given to both the creator and the school. This will allow wide dissemination of the work, will allow others to build upon it, will prevent others from making profit at your expense (someone can print and sell copies, but anyone else can do it, so if copies are sold that would be at near-cost prices), and will make sure the employee and the school get due credit.
There's a legal question here and an administrative one. Either way, this isn't a decision to be made and announced through the employee handbook. It's great though how you set out just to write a bit of documentation and you end up in a legal a philosophical minefield.
The legal question is who has the right of ownership over intellectual property, such as lesson plans, that teachers produce or use on the job. I imagine the precedents vary by your jurisdiction. Your school should look it up. The way you phrase the question, it sounds as if there aren't any explicit provisions in the teacher contracts that establish who owns what. Maybe it's time for the school to include a clause in the contract that makes the expectations and the legal situation clear.
But really the more important issue is that, again from the way you phrase your question, it sounds as if the school administration seems to expect to dictate terms of intellectual property ownership to its teachers. Regardless of whether they have the legal right to do that, it's just plain bad policy, a great way to pick an unnecessary fight. The administration should do what you're doing now, do some research and decide on a good model for a policy. Then they should bring the issue up at a faculty meeting, ask faculty what they want, give them a chance to go away and read about it, and then come back with their own proposal. Ideally, if you've got good administrators (sounds like they/you have good will, at least) who can negotiate well with faculty based on interests and not positions, then everyone leaves the room happy.
The wrong way to do it is for you, the Director of Technology, to make the decision, present it to the rest of the administration who accept it by default because they don't have any better ideas, and let the faculty know who owns their lesson plans by putting a handbook in their mailboxes at the start of the next term. The value of the intellectual property is either too small to be worth alienating employees or too valuable to approach sloppily.
The usual disclaimers: I'm not a lawyer or a teacher.
The second word should help you out....""The independent school"
If students sign a contract with the school to say that both parties assign full rights to one another in works that they create, then it doesn't matter what copyright law says. Contract trumps copyright. That's how the music industry works, for one thing.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Not only does the school AND the creators retain the rights to use the product, but so would anybody else. Other schools can then benefit and you can benefit from their input.
As an added bonus, nobody will be able to take away your rights to use it.
Unless your core business is selling software (not software related business) it should be the only option.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.