I found out recently that several students have posted my lecture slides on sites like Course Hero despite my requests for them not to do so. These sites give me a hard time when I request they take down this material. I feel like complete strangers are making money from my hard work. Q: Is this a concern for anybody else? If so, how have you dealt with it?
Ah yes. My students cannot do this because students only get stripped down versions of my slides- no pictures, missing words, and no links to anything. However, my younger, dream-supporter self did share my full slides with co-teachers (my dinosaur sorry I mean dept chair likes the concept of team teaching since it allows greybeards like him to shove their work onto the junior team member), and to my horror, my smart-ass TA posted ALL my slides on the local area network "as a parting gift" to the dept- and he had filled in the blanks, some with incorrect fillers!!! Now I only give out full slides to colleagues in pdf or print form.
ReplyDeleteI don't post complete slides. I usually don't post slides at all. When I do, they are in PDF format and missing the text (images only, come to class if you want to know what they mean).
ReplyDeleteI don't post slides at all, except once in a blue moon I relent and post a "greatest hits" review series before major exams. I tried posting partially filled slides once, but almost no one paid the slightest bit of attention so I stopped doing it. No one noticed.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that some anonymous bunch of bozos is probably profiting from your work. I'm wondering how you found out that your slides had been posted...Do you perform regular reconnaissance on sites like this?
No, I found out quite by accident while doing a search for one of my course codes.
DeleteMy slides tend to be pretty spare because they're only supposed to be memory joggers. The students are supposed to *gasp* listen and write down what I'm saying as well as reading what's on the slide.
ReplyDeleteJust for the flip side: I've posted full lectures (PDF format, of course). My problem has usually been the opposite: I often include notes-to-myself in the slides as stickies in Keynote, and they've shown up in the student versions! This is terrible when I'm making notes for the next year: "students didn't get this" "need to rewrite this section"
ReplyDeleteWhenever I post my lecture notes to the LMS, I always choose "all rights reserved" as my license. It means that those notes belong to me, and that others cannot use them for profit without paying me.
ReplyDeleteIf you have a campus legal department, go to them to see if they can help you draft a "cease and desist" letter to the company. If you don't have campus legal (or they won't help you), then search for examples of cease and desist letters and write one yourself.
Back when I was a peer instructor as an undergraduate, some website used local records and posted my home phone number and address along with my university information. The cease and desist letter I drafted (and cannot find for the life of me right now) got me a written apology and my information removed from their website within a week.
As for class notes, well, those are your intellectual property and they have no right to post them, as far as I know. Legal language with threats to "seek legal redress" usually get those websites to back down very, very quickly.
Thanks. This site has a list of hoops you need to jump through to have your material taken down. I'll see what I can do.
DeleteI never post my slides either, but I am familiar with the gut feeling you have. I have found my tests posted on StudentsOfFortune before and that's always disappointing -- clearly one of the students posted the quiz or test.
ReplyDeleteWhat's sad is that I alter every year's test slightly (rephrase questions etc) so it's obvious if a student uses a past answer -- it covers the same material, but not the same question.
So I get to fail anyone who uses it.
Still makes me disappointed.
I hadn't heard of StudentsOfFortune before, so off I went just now. Sorry your students have posted your tests there. Why is it "sad" that you get to fail anyone who uses the site? That would fill me with glee!
DeleteThe site is a hoot! The premise is legitimate - pay a TA for a tutorial. But of course there's a brisk trade in pilfered tests and custom-written papers.
My favorite request in my field was for a paper on ethics requiring "APA, min. 6 print sources, NO plagiarism!"
So I searched the topic "Ethics" and found, among other gems:
Assignment: Police Ethics and Deviance CJS 210 For Axia.
• Review Introduction to Policing, pp. 292-315.
• Write a 700- to 1,050-word paper, analyzing the ethical and deviant behaviors in policing.
This tutorial (about 838 words long) has been purchased 94 times!
I, for one, sure feel safer.
At our uni, one prof went to the university's legal counsel and got a cease-and-desist letter, claiming copyright infringment, as the course materials were original materials produced by the course instructor, who held the copyright and had explicitly disallowed posting online. Copyright laws differ from place to place, so good luck.
ReplyDeleteCan you simply put "Copyrighted material" at the bottom of each slide or in faded lettersa cross the slide like photo companies do or something?
ReplyDelete*across
DeleteMaybelle:
ReplyDeleteWhenever I post my lecture notes to the LMS, I always choose "all rights reserved" as my license. It means that those notes belong to me, and that others cannot use them for profit without paying me.
The Contemplative Cynic:
Can you simply put "Copyrighted material" at the bottom of each slide...
Sure, you can do these things, but neither of them are likely to solve the problem. Putting "All rights reserved" or "Copyrighted material" on something doesn't really add any protection for your intellectual property, at least in the United States.
You hold copyright in your material from the moment that you create it. Basically the only thing you can do that increases your level of legal protection is to register your material with the copyright office. Registration is required before you can file a suit for infringement, and registration before the act of infringement, or within three months of publication, also allows you to claim statutory damages in addition to actual damages.
If you really think that putting a copyright sign on your lecture slides is going to stop the little shits from posting them, or stop the websites from accepting them, then go right ahead, but I'd be very surprised if it had any effect at all. They know that they're not supposed to do it, but they do it anyway, and a written assertion of your rights isn't likely to change that.
Defunct, I didn't think that simply putting "copyrighted material" across it would hold up in court, but I know that I would hesitate before uploading something or using something that says "Copyrighted material" or "all rights reserved" (I think that's more 'threatening' to students than nothing at all). I'd think a visible warning on the slides themselves would help more than simply registering material with the copyright office.
DeleteI choose that license because I'm concerned my current institution could take my LMS shell and give it to another adjunct. With my current shell and handouts, another adjunct would have a course instantly.
DeleteIn the off chance I ever found out, then I would have recourse.
Part of my adjunct contract at Huge Corporate Online University stipulates that everything I have in the classroom is the intellectual property of the university. Nobody objects to this. When I've tried to raise the issue, the proverbial crickets were the loudest thing going on. So if anything I have in class ends up online, it is theoretically the university's concern as much as mine. I will have been twice robbed, the university once.
ReplyDeleteWorks-for-hire is a bitch of a copyright clause. That sucks, AdjunctSlave.
DeleteGreat success - I've had my content removed from three different sites. Thanks for the help everybody!
ReplyDelete