Maryland Pulls a Facebook, Wants to Claim Rights to Your Stuff
Credit: Extra Ketchup/flickr.comNot
long ago, Facebook came under fire for claiming commercial
ownership of user-submitted content on Instagram. These days, the
Prince George’s County Board of Education is thinking of
doing the same thing with a proposal that “would give them the
copyright to anything created by teachers, students, and employees
before, during, and after school hours,”
according to Fox News.
Local parents, understandably upset that their children’s school work may soon be the property of Big Brother, have joined with teachers to protest the policy. Fortunately,it is currently undergoing legal review—and looks like it won’t stand up.
From the Fox News article:
San Francisco copyright lawyer Lawrence Townsend… tells FoxNews.com that while the county has the right under the Work for Hire provision to police what teachers do, trying to stake a claim in what students create won't fly.
"The students are mostly under the age of 18 and federal law protects their rights," he said. Townsend added that unless a parent or guardian signs off on it, what a student creates belongs to the student and not the school.
The policy was apparently written to “protect the school system from teachers trying to sell their lesson plans online." But would that be so bad?
A marketplace where teachers could purchase quality lesson plans would certainly cut down on the workload that teachers face, leaving them more time for student interaction and meaningful assessment. It would also encourage teachers to develop better classroom materials from which they could earn a supplemental income.
It’s difficult to see how the students lose out in this scenario.
Public education is decidedly anti-competition, and the teachers union generally does all it can to keep charter schools and education vouchers from forcing their members to work any harder. In this instance, however, that same impulse towards protectionism should help block a policy that seems straight out of Soviet Russia.
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The policy was apparently written to “protect the school system from teachers trying to sell their lesson plans online." But would that be so bad?
It is commerce. It has to be evil. Anything done for money is. Didn't you know that?
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How dare they make extra money on doing good work for their school system!
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Protect it from what? How would the school system be harmed in any way by this? I guess maybe they were planning on selling them themselves.
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I say we take off and nuke PGC from orbit, just to be sure.
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Just give me notice. Living here (against my will). I can attest that the place freakin' sucks. I couldn't hate MD any more than I already do..but I can try.
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Isn't PG County essentially openly corrupt? This was probably written for one specific school board member to fuck over some specific person.
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Isn't
PG CountyMaryland essentially openly corrupt? This was probably written for one specific school board member to fuck over some specific person.Yes.
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Plead Guilty County is especially so.
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These new interns these days with their clever alt-texts. How are we supposed to make fun of them?
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It was a fluke.
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Makes you wonder about the legitimacy of the Turnitin.com racket going on at a lot of universities, whereby your "success" in the course is dependent on your willingness to have your papers permanently added to the Turnitin database for the purposes of detecting plagiarism, after yours is compared, of course.
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In Russia, materials copyright you!
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Will I ever get a hat tip? Even if Reason covers a story like three weeks after I do? Sigh. Also: Fuck off, Maryland slavers.
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WAR ON WOMEN
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You seem kinda needy. The most rewarding hat tips are unsolicited.
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The notion that any PG County public school teacher, let alone student, could create anything of economic value is facially absurd on a par with claiming copyright in and trying to sell one's groceries lists.
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Maryland is all around a horrible place.
