This article is the result of a symposium comprised of faculty, administrators, lawyers, and business representatives and focuses on two questions: 1) who owns learning materials? and 2) how can institutions encourage faculty to create learning products of the highest quality that can be marketed in such a way that both the university and the faculty benefit at some level? Twigg begins her discussion of intellectual property rights of electronic material with four case studies to bring out current legal and policy issues. The article concludes with its recommendations for resolving issues about faculty and institutional property rights over knowledge products and processes.

The first case is about super-star faculty and describes a Harvard professor who placed one of his courses on a CD ROM for sale to a virtual university. The central issue is whether the faculty or the institution owns the product. The second case is about the use of an institutional brand name; this study focuses on the case of UNext.com, a company that pays universities for the authorization to use their name and the names of the professors to sell their product. The central issue concerns whether any academic values might be threatened. The third case is about CaseNET, a university-based project providing colleges, universities, and school districts a resource from which to purchase scenario-based materials and case studies. The significance of this case is that faculty or departments can run knowledge-based businesses from within the structure of the host institution. The question is raised about the integrity of the institution as it relates to faculty and department quality. The fourth case study concerns the Math Emporium, a Virgnia-Tech computer facility that teaches calculus to larges numbers of students at one time. Through this instructional use of technology, the need for instructors is reduced, with fewer "facilitators" needed to complement the individualized computer sessions.

In the latter half of the paper, a helpful distinction is made by the symposium between what constitutes a "course" and what constitutes "course material," a distinction that is consonant with debates about the nature of learning objects and their components. Two myths are dispelled. First, contrary to much of the literature available on knowledge economics, profit forecasts about the lucrative possibilities of knowledge products are dismissed. Second, the concern that faculty will be replaced by CD ROM-based courses they themselves create is also dismissed.

Of interest in this article is the symposium's argument about the law on intellectual property rights. Simply stated, their view is that there is no real overriding precedent for either faculty rights to intellectual property or institutional rights under the works made for hire law. The consensus among those in the symposium is that faculty intellectual property rights should remain in the power of the faculty, the knowledge product creators, while allowing the ability of the hosting institution to exercise certain rights, without obtaining permission from the copyright owner. A list of the recommended rights is provided on the last page. It is worth underscoring the consensus among the symposium participants that faculty and their institutions will be best served by working things out among themselves, using the law only as a means to goals established before legal or policy consultation.

For the full text, see http://www.center.rpi.edu/ResMono.html

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