Did you know the University of South Alabama has a copyright
policy? (See http://www.southalabama.edu/departments/research/resources/CopyrightPolicy.pdf.) USA is not alone: universities often develop
copyright policies to create a common understanding about what copyright is,
since copyright law is far from intuitive.
Such policies are useful to ensure consistency and fairness. Also, several sections of the copyright law
require a relevant institutional policy in order to qualify for a statutory
safe harbor, such as those found in the TEACH Act or the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act.
The University of South Alabama Copyright Policy lists the
rules for determining ownership of copyright, based on both the category of copyrightable work and the category of author. There are three categories of copyrightable
works, a “directed work” created at the direction of the university, traditional
or “non-directed works,” and sponsored or externally contracted works, such as grants. Categories of author include faculty,
executive, administrative, managerial, staff, or student.
While I will refer the reader to the actual policy to parse
the intricacies of determining copyright ownership, it appears that USA retains
the copyright for works created under the direction of, or with substantial
support from, the university. As an
illustration, works created by an employee within the scope of his or her
employment is considered to be a “work for hire,” aka “work made for hire,”
(see 17 U.S.C. § 101 for a definition http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101) and it is well settled in US copyright law
that the employer (or commissioner of the work) retains copyright ownership of
the copyright, as is the case at USA, absent an agreement between the
university and the employee creator.
The USA Copyright Policy also contains a discussion of shop
rights and information on copyright revenue sharing. In addition, as typical of many research
institutions, the University of South
Alabama also has a separate policy for
patents, in contrast to other universities that have one combined policy covering both copyrights and patents or other forms of intellectual property: see:
(Originally published in Biofeedback
107 - October 2015.)
