Copyright for New Zealand Teachers

So this week I was introduced to a concept that I was completely unaware of as a teacher.

And by concept, I mean law.

As a creative, I have different fingers in different creative exploits including art, photography, web design, and music. Needless to say I thought I was rather familiar with the rules around copyright. Especially in it’s purpose to protect the creator of the work in question. I’m very familiar with the understanding that anything created for a company or corporate, being paid for by the company or corporate, then the company or corporate hold the copyright for that work, unless otherwise agreed upon. However as a teacher, I feel it’s slightly different, especially since so much “personal” time is invested in creating resources, planning lessons, or creating avenues of learning.

However, I was completely unaware that under the 1994 New Zealand Copyright Act, schools fall into the same sort of category as a company or corporate; meaning that the copyright to works that teachers create is owned by the Board of Trustees. This means that, when teachers share, collaborate, and take resources they’ve made from one job to another without the Board’s express permission, they’re breaking the law.

This is slightly concerning. I know of many teachers who have moved around to different teaching positions. It happens all the time. I know of at least 7 teachers who have moved in and/or out of at my current school during my 6 years there. It is also concerning given the nature of teaching, and teacher willingness to share, collaborate, and work together to have a greater impact on the world around them, by influencing and helping other colleagues, whether they be at the same school, the school down the road, or the school at the other end of the country.

In different conversations around this, I received an email from Carolyn Stewart, who has been a principal for many years, and is now involved with Network 4 Learning. In it she explains the law very clearly and concisely in a way that if most laws were written like, the majority of us would have some chance of actually understanding them!

She says:

“The copyright for any teaching and learning resources, that is clearly linked to the daily employment of the resource creator, whether in school time or not belongs to the Board of Trustees who are their employer…  A teacher should only share resources outside their school boundary with the permission of their Board of Trustees – this includes taking resources when they move from school to school. Practically this is quite difficult to manage as we all know that deep within NZ teachers’ DNA is the propensity to share with others to improve learning for all NZ children.”

Many schools and teachers do not realise this. I was one of them.

TKI outlines it very clearly for teachers – but obviously we are incredibly busy and don’t like to use our time trawling through every webpage on TKI. In the page about Teachers and contractors copyright, it says

As I did a little more investigating, it raised more and more questions.

  • How does this work for the Registered Teacher Criteria, that requires teachers to gather evidence of meeting the requirements of an effective teacher? Am I able to take this portfolio of my work with me and use it in another teacher role?
  • How does this work with templates or reports we have developed and shared with other schools, and vice versa?
I do find it all very interesting and I believe many teachers will need to know this, especially when they come to the job or leave the job. Essentially the BOT could ask for all materials, resources, templates, planning from a teacher when they leave.
I’m not saying they would.
But I am saying they could, by law.
I guess as a teacher, I don’t want to leave my current school and have to start from complete scratch again because I developed my own planning templates, lessons, resources, printables and others under my current school’s banner.
As I see it, the school pays for my time as a teacher; not necessarily for the things I make for myself to help me teach.
Beyond this, we already know the lines between being paid as a teacher and personal time are blurred beyond anything Robin Thicke can come up with. So where does the Board of Trustees ownership begin and end? Is a lesson I create at home automatically property of the school? What about something else, say, an artwork? Obviously we would say it has to be teaching related.
Okay – so what about this article? Or any of the countless other articles I’ve written about teaching? Are they owned by the school, even though I’ve written them all in my own time? There seems to be more questions than answers!
This is different to things resources like equipment that the school buys. The topic of resources leads to another interesting conundrum.
If I purchase equipment, resources, or even software personally, I’m allowed to take those with me. They belong to me.
If the school purchases equipment and resources etc., obviously they stay with the school.
If I created a resource (because I’ve seen something and reckon I could do a better job making it instead of buying it) surely that’s me saving my own and/or the schools money. Because let’s face it, if the case is any resources I need I can’t take with me, then I’m going to be charging the school for. Why would I bother making it myself? If it’s staying at the school because of copyright, then I may as well purchase an existing (albeit inferior) one.

The Solution?

To me there is a very obvious solution to this conundrum the copyright law have left teachers in. Rather than having to ask permission of each and every Board of Trustees I work with in my career as a teacher, my suggestion would be for each school Board of Trustees to make permission to take ‘Teacher made’ resources a policy of the school. This would be a relatively simple statement waiving the right to withhold teachers taking their own resources, materials, planning, units, with them. As copyright holders, they can make the rules of who is allowed to use the copyrighted material or not. By making it open and allowing teachers to do so would be a very welcome policy in most schools, I would suggest.

What others are saying

So, the usual process when something like this comes up, is I hit Google and do a bit of a search to see what others are saying about this issue I previously knew nothing about.

Most interestingly, only a year ago, this article slipped through the news. In it, Matt McGreggor of Creative Commons in New Zealand says

“There’s a real absurdity in most schools at the moment where teachers don’t hold the copyright to their resources,” he said. “What that means is that teachers who share all the time are breaching the copyright of their board of trustees.

“Every school in New Zealand should fix that problem by passing a Creative Commons policy.”

So even those who work in the copyright industry say that the rule is stupid, but there is a very simple solution, similar – if not better – to the one I suggested earlier.

Covering all the aspects of this is a webpage created by Creative Commons that outlines all that I discovered in the course of this article. It outlines the issues, as well as advocates on behalf of teachers for all boards to make a policy change so that Teachers are able to legally share their resources or take them with them as they move to another school. They have even created a template, making it easy for boards to implement a new policy.

With it, they have made a couple of videos as well.

I know for me, I will have to add another item to the next Board of Trustees meeting agenda.

Related Reading:

3 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *