Policies for Intellectual Property and Distance Learning

April 25, 2001

With the advent of widespread use of the Internet to convey information, there has been considerable interest in formulating college and university policies concerning intellectual property (IP), especially as it relates to distance learning (DL). When professors’ lectures are put on the Internet to be distributed to potentially numerous students at a physical distance from the academic point of origin, who owns and controls the lectures and the courses they comprise?