Copyright Concerns in the Age of Distance Education. ERIC Digest.

In the United States, copyright owners retain exclusive rights to their creative works. They alone have the legal right to reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, or publicly display their works or to construct derivative works. The recently enacted Digital Millennium Copyright Act has created several complex questions related to distance education for which higher education institutions must quickly search for procedural answers. This Digest poses and answers four questions that challenge basic knowledge of current copyright law and typify current concerns in institutions of higher education. Questions include whether or not movies may legally be shown as part of distance education course offerings, who holds intellectual property rights to a distance education course constructed by faculty, what intellectual property right individuals should pursue when creating distance education materials, and whether faculty may legally distribute to distance education students electronic copies of materials that would normally be placed on reserve for them in the school's library. (PW)