Educational Resources Developers’ Copyright

Introduction. Development of digital technologies, expansion of the spheres of distant learning implementation in the context of providing the educational services has resulted in creation and location of large amount of informational content at the open educational resources and institutional websites with access restricted for the external users. As consequence, there arise issues of authorship and copyright holding of the above-mentioned content, the limits of using the intellectual activity results of the authors of such content, distribution of remuneration received for its commercial use, as well as protection of subjects’ copyright whenever it is violated.

Materials and Methods. The present study is based on the works of Russian and foreign researchers on copyright, on provisions of the Russian Federation Civil and Labor Law, as well as on the legislation of foreign countries. General scientific and specific scientific methods were used, such as the method of comparative legal studies, which allowed finding out approaches for solving the set forth problems in the frame of the other jurisdictions.

Results. The conducted research shows that the problem of unlawful use of the educational content and protection of the rights of the content authors and copyright holders is widely spread and is especially relevant for the open educational resources. The authors of the present article have come to the conclusion that educational online content should be qualified as a complex piece of work and at the same time as a computer software and a unique database. The limits of free use of such a product should be specifically stipulated, i.e. for personal use, for non commercial use. For settling disputes between the authors and educational institutions, it is proposed to specify in an employment contract the types of pieces of work that are considered institutional ones, and to determine the conditions for using them among the parties.

Discussion and Conclusions. The investigated problems of creating and locating the large informational-educational content, of using and processing the results of intellectual activity of the authors of such content, distributing the remuneration received for its commercial use, as well as protecting the rights of subjects in case of violation, have great practical importance, because the findings can be applied to solving the problems of exclusive ownership of the institutional pieces of work.

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