Legal Action on Copyright Infringement In order to protect the continued availability of the Television Production and Mass Media materials at CyberCollege® and the InternetCampus®, from time to time it has become necessary to threaten legal action against people or institutions that have illegally reproduced the materials or have used these trademarked names for their own purposes. My legal agreement stipulates that I will "take all reasonable measures" to keep the materials from being illegally reproduced. On one case where an instructor was being compensated for creating a cybercourse, all of the production modules were copied and that instructor's name was substituted for that of the actual author. (Internet savvy students tend to catch this sort of thing.) In another case large sections of the materials were copied for a printed, in-house text. Actually, there are major disadvantages to a printed format anyway; the element of color is generally lost, which is important to many of the concepts, and none of the interactive elements are available. As noted in the copyright information, using the text or illustrations (including linking to the illustrations), or transferring the materials to a server for local use, violates my legal agreements in providing these materials free of charge and subjects me to breach of contract litigation. My agreement is limited to providing the materials in an unaltered form for direct Internet access. I regularly get requests to link to one of the CyberCollege or InternetCampus websites. In fact, no permission is necessary to link to any complete page or index at any of the five sites. My agreements do allow a student or an instructor to print out one copy of the materials for their personal use. Other exceptions to the copyright restrictions include the Television Production and Mass Media test questions and puzzle quizzes, which instructors are free to reproduce and use in their classrooms. Sorry for the severe tone of this, but I feel a responsibility to the many students and instructors that use these materials to make sure they continue to be available and continue to be free of charge (and that I stay out of legal trouble!). |
| To protect everyone's interests, I would appreciate your bringing instances of copyright infringement to my attention. You can click the e-mail button below. |
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