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This document was proffered by Ken Salomon of Thompson Coburn LLC, in response to the question of who owns material created by faculty.  According to Salomon, 'Strictly speaking, particularly if the course is produced at the direction of the institution and is within the instructor's scope of employment, the institution owns the course under section 101 of the Copyright Act, the work-made- for-hire provision.  However, it is increasingly common for institutions to forego ownership or for the parties to enter into royalty free non-exclusive licenses to cover each party's use of the work by the institution and the instructor.'

According to the beginning of this document, 'Copyright law protects a work from the time it is created in a fixed form. From the moment it is set in a print or electronic manuscript, a sound recording, a computer software program, or other such concrete medium, the copyright becomes the property of the author who created it. Only the author or those deriving rights from the author can rightfully claim copyright.

There is, however, an exception to this principle: “works made for hire.” If a work is made for hire, an employer is considered the author even if an employee actually created the work. The employer can be a firm, an organization, or an individual.

The concept of “work made for hire” can be complicated. This circular refers to its definition in copyright law and draws on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it in Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, decided in 1989.'

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