Davis Faculty Association

Most UCD faculty members go to a great effort to create their lecture materials and feel a strong sense of ownership in them. Student take notes at lectures and the internet has created a new market for the distribution of those notes. The instructor’s legal rights are long-established in terms of California law, but not clear in federal law. What can you do to protect those rights? Here is a summary based on an analysis by Jan Carmikle in the Business Contracts Office.

According to California common law, upheld by an older court case in which a UCLA instructor sued a commercial notetaking service, instructors hold copyrights to their lectures, and notes taken by students in their classes are therefore subject to restrictions as to copying and distribution, requiring prior consent of the instructor, such as the consent requested by Classical Notes on campus. So, as long as your lectures are given in California, this applies.

However, federal copyright protection of faculty lectures is not so clear. Federal law protects works “fixed in any tangible medium of expression.” But, since few instructors lecture verbatim from their written notes, these lectures may or may not meet the legal definition of “fixed,” and therefore may not be fully protected under federal law. National note-distribution firms have taken the position that federal law allows them to conduct their business without the need to respect California law (and that of a few other states) on this issue. This position is facing legal challenges, but final court judgements have not been made.

What Can You Do?

Since it is not clear that federal law protects your work, it is important to mention the protection of state law on notices. Here is one that is suggested you put on class syllabi, handouts and web pages:

While faculty do not necessarily want to keep students from sharing notes with other students in the class, this notice makes clear that any other type of distribution of personal class notes is not allowed.

If you find that notes are being distributed without your permission, you should collect any documentary evidence, such as printout of a web page offering the notes for sale which includes the URL and date (standard on most web browser printouts). The Business Contracts Office will take this information and send a “cease and desist” letter to the offending company, retaining documentation in the event you or the Regents eventually take legal action.

There are many other issues related to copyright ownership of interest to faculty members, in particular their ownership of recorded lectures. This is a matter of current discussion, although it is clear that the faculty own the products of their scholarly activities including lectures except when those rights are signed over. So, in the absence of any agreement, the faculty member owns the lecture no matter in what form it exists. DFA may present more details here in the future, and the following resources provide some current thinking from UC sources on the matter.

Additional Resources:

Business Contracts & Analysis website: http://vcadmin.ucdavis.edu/contracts
The UC Report on Copyright Ownership, http://www.ucop.edu/acadinit/copyright/reports.html

This bulletin contains three tables of data: I. Systemwide Salary Differential Over 20 Years; II. Davis Personnel Actions in Systemwide Perspective; III. Historical Davis Campus Personnel Practices. Notice particularly the low salary ranking in table one and the high CAP denial rate in table three.

Some definitions: The term CCO is long standing UC shorthand for “Chief Campus Officer.”  In principle that is the Chancellor; in practice it is almost invariably the Vice Provost by delegation from the “CCO.” Professional schools are excluded from the Academe survey and main campus faculty who are on 11 months’ appointments have their gross salaries scaled back to their nine-months’ equivalents–roughly a 15% reduction.

Table I: Systemwide Salary Differential over 20 years

The Davis faculty have been at or near the bottom of the systemwide salary ladder for many years. The table recently distributed with data from 1998-99 continues rankings that have held more or less constant for over 20 years. The following information was published in “Academe”, a periodical of the AAUP, which publishes extensive information about faculty economic matters annually. Both salary and “compensation” data are presented. The latter includes employer-paid benefits that have cash equivalents. The last column in the tables is the difference between the Compensation and the Salary at the Full rank.

Table II: Davis Personnel Actions in Systemwide Perspective

The following is a summary of information taken from CAP annual reports of other Divisions along with similar information for UCD in 1997-98 and 1998-9.

Table III: Historical Davis Campus Personnel Practices

The following information was taken from the Annual Reports of the UCD Committee on Academic Personnel at five year intervals for the last 20 years. The committee reports vary in the amount of detail they present about the various actions so what appears below is just the “bare bones” yes/no figures from each of them. “Other” represents mainly actions pending or split votes. Total numbers of actions from CAP and CCO do not necessarily agree exactly because of carry-overs from prior years, etc.