Educators may find use in monitoring the still quiet, but potentially robust legal battle about what copyrights mean in the digital age.
Google says its digitizing copying policy balances copyrights with “user needs” for their proprietary Google Library Project.
The U.S. publishing industry, through the Association of American Publishers (AAP), continues to express to Google grave misgivings about the Google Print Library Project and specifically the Project’s unauthorized copying and distribution of copyright-protected works.
Resolution of this disagreement could affect teachers directly.
Imagine, you have used your time, talent, and other resources to create lesson plans (Do you know who legally who owns your lesson plans?), so all of your students score above average on standardized tests. (About one third of teachers likely fall into this category.)
Then, enterprising souls apply Google’s reasoning to teacher lesson plans. They take your plans without your permission, digitize them, distribute them for free, and collect revenue from advertisements on digitized pages of your work.
You receive, in Google’s terms, participation in a program that benefits the industry and, most important, the millions of users who’ll be able to discover new books (or lesson plans in your case).
Will teachers who use Tablet PCs and other electronic equipment to fulfill their contracted roles have a vested interest in the legal resolve of this issue?
eSchool News offers an additional view about Google’s project and copyright infringements.