There has been concern expressed by faculty across many colleges about potential abuses of intellectual property (IP) rights in the rush to take classes online during Covid-19 shutdowns. OPSEU leadership and your local executive understand these concerns and want you to know that they are working behind the scenes to make sure management respects the related laws and provisions in our collective agreement (CA) that deal with copyright and IP.
Some members may have heard rumors of or read wording within their college’s IP policy that suggests that anything uploaded to the colleges’ learning management system (LMS) becomes the property of the college. OPSEU’s experts say this is not necessarily true and point to Article 13.01 in our CA and Canada’s Copyright Act
It is the union’s belief that much of the new work involved with taking classes online falls outside the scope of the normal work already assigned to your SWF or partial load contract and is therefore not automatically the property of the college. However, if you receive a revised SWF that speaks specifically to taking work online that may not be the case.
For those of you creating new content such as recorded lectures and presentations, the advice is to host these assets outside of the LMS on YouTube or another cloud-based platform and then simply provide the links to the work inside DC Connect. This way the lectures and presentations remain your uploads and can be removed or set to private later on if you wish.
If faculty wish they can also place copyright notices on their work, although it is largely symbolic and makes no difference to the protection afforded under law because Canadian legislation grants instant protection the moment any work is created by the author.
OPSEU and your local will continue to monitor this issue but at the moment it is important to note that we have no indication or evidence that management has any plans to use this crisis to abuse members’ rights in this regard. We are simply working proactively to safeguard your interests while you have bigger things to worry about.
In solidarity,
Your local executive
Local 354