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I am currently a Bachelor's student at a European university. In the previous term (winter term of 2023/2024), I tutored a certain course with Lecturer A. However, Lecturer A will leave my university at the end of this term (summer term of 2024). I have found out that in the next term (winter term of 2024/2025), lecturer B will lecture this course. I asked Lecturer B whether I could tutor this course again. She happily agreed and said that because this would be her first time lecturing this particular course, it would be very useful to her if I could provide some of the course material from the previous time the lecture was held by Lecturer A.

Is it ethically acceptable to share course material from Lecturer A with Lecturer B? Or is there some kind of confidentiality that could make sharing the course material unethical? The course material mainly consists of the lecture notes written up in LaTeX by Lecturer A, including the exercises which took about 50% of the course's time. The lecture notes were available to all students of the course, but only through the university's system, by which I'm trying to say that they weren't available publicly.

I could simply ask Lecturer A about this. However, it is well-known that Lecturer A takes a very long time to reply by e-mail and it is apparently difficult to reach her.

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    You already know that it's unethical-to-illegal to use someone's intellectual property without asking them; you have lecturer A's contact details and no significant reason to not "simply ask". What answer do you expect from this community? Commented Aug 13 at 12:45
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    @coffee_into_plots I was hoping that there would be some generally accepted etiquette on this - If not, I will just hope for a reply from lecturer A. Commented Aug 13 at 12:50
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    You should ask Lecturer A, waiting for an answer. When you get one, respect it. Commented Aug 13 at 13:06
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    @coffee_into_plots "unethical-to-illegal to use someone's intellectual property without asking them" - haven't heard of that. Without attributing them, sure, but why would I always need to ask (apart from being nice)?
    – Bergi
    Commented Aug 14 at 18:01
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    @coffee_into_plots The IP is almost certainly owned by the university, not by the individual authors, in which case one only needs to worry about the ethical question, not the legal question.
    – user128581
    Commented Aug 15 at 12:04

4 Answers 4

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Lecturer B should contact Lecturer A and ask to use that course material. A negative response must be respected; no response must be interpreted as negative.

I'd expect Lecturer A to agree happily based on my own experiences, but I could be wrong.

Edit: Based on the comments, some institutions consider course material developed by faculty as property of the institution; mine did not. If OP's does, and did at the time Lecturer A developed the material, then it may belong to the institution. Check on policy.

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    Concerning "I'd expect Lecturer A to agree happily," to paraphrase Peter Suber, academics write to be read. I'm retired, but I just spent an uncompensated summer revising material from a course I used to teach so that it can be used by those teaching the course this fall. It makes me happy that material I've written will continue to be used.
    – Bob Brown
    Commented Aug 13 at 13:53
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    I suspect it would make you happier if the material was shared in such a way as to guarantee acknowledgement. Commented Aug 13 at 14:13
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    Exactly. Lecturer B must ask Lecturer A. No intermediary, as an intermediary would likely violate fair use (taking material from A and give it to B). The remaining job (of the more senior intermediary) is to assure that B does not present the material from A in a manner that is in violation of fair use. Otherwise, as A is likely under no contractual obligation to give away their work, whether A is or is not happy to do so is a deciding factor in the final outcome. Commented Aug 13 at 14:30
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    "some institutions consider course material developed by faculty as property of the institution; mine did not" - Also copyright laws in the relevant jurisdiction might make this not a decision of the institution, but a matter of law. Commented Aug 15 at 14:42
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If you expect lecturer A to take a long time to respond, or not to respond at all, perhaps it is worth asking a reliable person in your institution what the department's policy is.

I say this because, in many places, the university retains at least some rights to re-use course materials, even after a lecturer leaves: they have paid lecturer A to produce them, after all.

You say this material was only available through the university system. I would expect lecturer B to have access through the system, or at least to be able to request it.

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    I've discussed this with our school's counsel, and counsel clearly considers all my teaching material that I've generated here to be "work for hire", and the course material is theirs. The instructors of coursework in education I've taken suggested that this is still a contentious issue, with a variety of policies at a variety of schools. Commented Aug 13 at 14:16
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I don't see any problem in showing course material to the new lecturer B, unless lecturer A explicitly told you it is confidential. AFAIK it should not be a copyright issue to show a physical copy of lecture notes and material to somebody else.

Whether it is ok for lecturer B to copy or include larger parts of it into their own lecture notes is something entirely different. This should only be done if lecturer A agrees or if there is some rule allowing it (like a department rule, or if the lecture notes are published under an open source license).

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You don't have copyright to this material. Presumably, somebody that's not you does. That somebody is either the person that wrote the material, or perhaps the school that the person works for. There are cases to be made for both.

In any case, if you decide to share the material with Professor B, you would be doing through one of two pathways: either in receiving the material, you have been given some form of license to share it, or you would be sharing it claiming "fair use". A third possibility is that the material was written and already given some sort of license (similar to a stack exchange post!), and the conditions for sharing are already clear. I'll ignore this scenario, as you would probably know about it if it were relevant here.

Let's talk about any implied licenses you may have been given that would allow you to share it. If this is the case, you'd likely find reference to it in your school's policy materials or your course materials. At my own school, unauthorized sharing of course material is specifically listed as a violation in our Academic Honesty Policy. In my specific coursework, in my syllabi, I state that sharing is not authorized. I don't know what prof A's policy is, but you can certainly look in the syllabus and/or course site to try to figure it out.

"Fair use" is a legal term, and whether fair use applies to the scenario you describe is arguable either way. That's how these things work. There are those that will say "Fair Use applies", and those that will say it doesn't. If you would like to figure it out, a librarian would be specifically trained in this area, and would be able to help you. University librarians seem particularly knowledgeable in this area, because these issues come up all the time as profs prepare course material.

Beyond a librarian, there are four factors that are used to figure out if fair use applies. The exercise is often unsatisfactory, as the answers are often not clear.

This library (https://library.madonna.edu/copyright/fairuse) offers some good guidelines. This figure that they provide illustrates all of them. I particularly like this figure, because of how clearly it shows that fair use is a continuum, and not a black and white binary issue.

fair use guidelines from library.madonna.edu

The same library also offers a flow chart of how the determination is made: fair use flowchart from library.madonna.edu

The big point in the flow chart, that often gets unfortunately ignored, is that you need to investigate all four areas to make a strong determination of fair use -- one of them is not enough.

In your specific case, the fact that you'd like to take essentially all the course materials and hand them to someone else seems to violate criteria two, pushing this away from fair use in the continuum. I'd suggest that criteria 1 is also violated, because prof B may end up using the material in exactly the way it was meant to be used. Also, if the material is out there, it may become harder for prof A to make a living by teaching the stuff.

Further, the original material may be bound by some license. For example, adopting a textbook often confers upon the instructor the right to use art from that book in their teaching materials (when properly acknowledged). In this case, sharing those materials with prof B might violate prof A's de facto agreement with that publisher.

Lastly, when you're sharing stuff that isn't yours, the polite thing to do is to ask the person who's stuff it is if they're OK with that. It's simply the mannerly thing to do. "The prof is unresponsive to email" simply isn't a good enough reason to ignore this.

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  • OP says this is happening somewhere in Europe, and many European countries have laws that would make the university, not Lecturer A, own the copyright to any material that was produced in the course of employment. "Fair use" would not really matter. So Lecturer A actually doesn't get to decide whether or not their work can be reused, it's not "their" work strictly speaking (typically, the only thing they can demand is e.g. that their name be taken off the material). Nor should OP need to worry, Lecturer B might already be free to do anything. But IANAL and we don't even know OP's jurisdiction.
    – TooTea
    Commented Aug 16 at 13:38
  • @TooTea -- the last paragraph still applies, even if copyright laws don't exist. Commented Aug 16 at 13:57
  • Indeed, but half of your answer talks about "fair use", which AFAIK is a US legal concept that probably does not even exist wherever OP is. There's a decent chance that the local copyright law makes the situation perfectly clear and most of your answer does not apply.
    – TooTea
    Commented Aug 16 at 14:04
  • @TooTea -- yes-- that was because some of the earlier answers used "fair use" arguments that weren't on fleek Commented Aug 16 at 14:09

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