Last Thursday I received an email from my undergraduate advisor, C. R. Jayasundera, concerning my (now dead) website, joeyrobert.org, advising me to call him ASAP. joeyrobert.org was basically a small scale version of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, where I posted all of the course material from what I was taking. It was intended to give lower years (at UW) and those interested in physics some chewing material for courses they might be interested in, and it was nowhere near as comprehensive as anything on OCW. It was NOT a go-to website for would-be cheaters. I certainly wouldn’t want link potential employers to a website like that.

I understand the dubious legality of posting copyrighted material which I was doing. However, on campus and online there exist several student society funded exam banks, whose purpose is to save old exams (which they may or may not have the copyright for) for future students. What is the difference between that and archiving my course material online?

He went on to say that posting that sort of material, such as labs I’ve written and course assignments, was tantamount to plagiarism and that I should take it down before the issue went up to the dean. This sort of offsets me a little because I’m expecting that perhaps a professor complained about his or her copyright (though I had received the approval from some professors). This brings up the question: Well, gosh darnit, who owns the copyrights to my lab reports? That should not be a gray area. The university provided the resources for the lab, however, I performed the experiment, and I wrote every word in the document.

UW is actually pretty clear on this (and this is often stated explicitly as a benefit for those who might want to do research at UW):

Ownership. Except as stipulated below, it is University policy that ownership of rights in IP created in the course of teaching and research activities belong to the creator(s).

The exceptions are:

• The University normally retains ownership of IP rights in works created as ‘assigned tasks’ in the course of administrative activities (see Appendix A).
• Owners of IP rights in scholarly works created in the course of teaching and research activities grant the University a non-exclusive, free, irrevocable license to copy and/or use such works in other teaching and research activities, but excluding licensing and distribution to persons or organizations outside the University community. Any such licensing and/or distribution activity would be authorized only by an additional license from the owner(s).
• In sponsored or contract research activities, ownership of IP rights may be determined in whole or in part by the regulations of the sponsor or the terms of the contract. Participants in these research activities must be made aware of any such stipulations of the contract by the Principal Investigator, that is, the leader of the research project.

The ‘assigned tasks’ section doesn’t apply to my work as a student, as per the appendix (emphasis mostly mine):

Assigned Tasks. For the purposes of determining ownership of IP rights, “assigned tasks” are understood to mean job-related duties such as the preparation of memoranda, letters, administrative reports, minutes of meetings, mid-term and final examinations, assignments, laboratory manuals and administrative computer programs written to support the University’s on-going operations. Assigned tasks would not normally include scholarly works as defined below.

Scholarly Work: A work eligible for intellectual property protection under Canadian and/or international law which is created in the course of teaching, learning or research at the University. A list of scholarly works would include, but not necessarily be limited to: student works submitted for academic evaluation, research reports, papers prepared for publication, books, computer programs, detailed assignments, works of art, experimental data, and other academic data bases.

So what is it UW?

Reference: UW Policy 73 — Intellectual Property Rights