Hey, Professor!: Copyright Law

In order to share assigned readings with their students, many Harvard professors post materials on their course websites. Are these professors violating copyright laws? Kyle K. Courtney, a copyright advisor and program manager in Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication, works in conjunction with Harvard libraries on copyright matters. He shared his thoughts on this sticky issue with Fifteen Minutes.

Fifteen Minutes Magazine: Tell us a bit about the issue. Are professors posting work online legally, or are these copyright violations going under the radar?

Kyle K. Courtney: I would like to say that it was tolerated, I think, by publishers for a while. But then I think that that time has come to an end to a certain extent... In November of 2013, Harvard received 23 takedown notices from a publisher.

FM: What laws are professors violating when they post copyrighted work online?

KKC: If they don’t own the copyright and someone else owns the copyright, then they are violating Section 106, basically, of copyright law… That is the small bundle of rights that is owned and operated by the copyright holder… Every copyright owner has a little bundle of rights: the right to reproduce the work or recopy, the right to prepare derivative works, the right to distribute copies of the work to the public, the right to perform the work, and the right to display the work. When you sign a contract signing away all those bundle of rights … then when you’re posting stuff online that is technically not yours anymore, you’re violating both the reproduction and the distribution, perhaps even the performance for a display.