Mayland’s PG County Wants to Copyright Student’s Work

Under copyright law, anything you produce belongs to you. You don’t have to explicitly copyright those materials either. You make it, its yours automatically under current copyright law. But now Prince George’s County in Maryland is making a grab to claim copyright for all work product created by teachers or students to automatically belong to the school system. This would be similar to employees of corporations who legally must turn over work product to the company if it was created on company time. So what’s the problem with this?

Think about the Anne Arundel County student who just created a dipstick test for cancer. If he was a PG County student, his school work which led to him winning the science fair and a likely lucrative new invention, would belong to the school.

From WaPo here:

A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.

Some have questioned the legality of the proposal as it relates to students.

If the policy is approved, the county would become the only jurisdiction in the Washington region where the school board assumes ownership of work done by the school system’s staff and students.

David Rein, a lawyer and adjunct law professor who teaches intellectual property at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, said he had never heard of a local school board enacting a policy allowing it to hold the copyright for a student’s work.

Even if they do get the copyright and intellectual property of students, what will they do with it? Is the school system allowed to sell teacher created apps to other counties or school systems? Can it bring new inventions to market and make a profit from them? I don’t think so. This grab of property rights should be squashed asap.