Licensing materials

Ross Woods, Jul. 07

 

A license would allow another person or organization to make copies of your materials for their students. Ownership of copyright doesn't change. The licensee is only paying for a license to use it. If you wrote your materials, they are already copyrighted. In Australia, copyright law automatically covers everything you write when you write it, even your personal shopping lists.

You have at least these options:

1. You can sell paper copies, with the same copyright protection as any other book. They will own their copies.
2. You can sell copies on disk or via internet access, although you need to set conditions on how the users may print things off and make backup copies.

 

How to provide materials

Providing materials on a disk is probably the best way to go. After that, you should decide whether you will permit licensees to modify the materials.

Some licensers would provide only pdf files to prevent the users making changes to them, although pdf files offer less security than they once did. The point may be to include in the license a prohibition on reproducing them in any other form, and some kind of enforceable penalty for non-compliance.

On the other hand, the licensee may need to adapt the materials in some way, e.g. as part of their continual improvement or for particular student groups. For that reason, it may be better to provide materials as .doc files (or even publisher files) with the conditions that:

• they may produce modified versions and
• all derivative versions remain your property and
• they will provide you with copies.

 

What should materials look like?

Include any of the following that are relevant to your course:

• Guidelines as to what is in your materials and how to use them
• Information on the target population for which the materials were designed
• Information on the job description that students are trained to perform
• Information on field-tests of the materials
• Class handouts
• Textbooks
• PowerPoints
• Website materials
• Teaching notes
• Instructions to the assessor on how to do the assessment
• Assessment activities
• Assessment forms

Do not include a copy of readings from other sources. If somebody else wrote them, they're copyright and you are not allowed to sell them. Just provide a list or references of the readings.

Before licensing materials, you need to do the following:

1. Check that you really own copyright on everything you wish to license.
2. Arrange the materials in an order that a teacher will easily understand.
3. Use a consistent layout, font, and spelling system. You might need to tidy any loose ends, such as typos, language style, spelling and grammar, layout,and graphical design.
4. Brand them in some way, at least with a name.
5. Include a copyright notice, including graphics and photographs.
6. On each item, put a version identifier, at least a date of publication. (If you don't, it will be presumed to be the first edition.)
7. Organize the materials into a package.

You would only need to provide updates if you promise to do so in the license.

 

How should you structure the fee?

As there is no standard charge, you can (and perhaps should) think about how you structure the fee. There are a number of options:

• An flat annual fee for unlimited numbers of students (common)
• A site license, with a fee for each site, for particular locations regardless of the number of
• students at that location (quite common)
• A flat fee for the whole of a defined period over several years for unlimited numbers of students (very unusual)
• A flat per-student per semester fee
• A flat per-student per year fee
• A sliding scale (the more students they have, the lower the fee per student) fairly common

Some licensors have an establishment fee to cover the costs of setting up the agreement, in which case the ongoing fee would be lower.