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When Is a Syllabus “Work Product” That Belongs to the School?
Instructors at colleges and universities prepare their syllabi for the term, and the question is being asked: Who owns the rights to it?
Einstein was an intellectual genius who not only had a great sense of humor but also an understanding of people’s rights and was an activist against war. I wonder how he would have viewed the status of professors’ rights to the syllabi they produce and what schools see as their "work product.”
The main query is: Who owns the work the employee or independent contractor produces? Is it similar to the “work product” in the legal field, or something else? Essentially, it pertains to IP (intellectual property) but also money and ownership. But IMHO, this should be copyrighted material that the one who produced it retains as their right. Too many schools don’t agree with my premise and see it as their own to do with as they wish. It is, as Thomas Edison thought, their’s alone because they paid the employee.
Edison, who is revered as a genius in the field of invention, having 1,093 patents for everything from the electric light bulb, the stock-market ticker, the phonograph, the dictaphone, the self-filling swimming pool, and scores of other inventions to his credit, gave short shrift to his scientists when it came to IP. The men in those small laboratories were…
