School VLE / Learning Portal - Any Intellectual property when based on WordPress???

[burgemaster]

Morning all,

 

Our Dept head has discussed that if he wrote a text book in school during work hours when he was being paid to do it, the school would retain full "Intellectual property rights" of the textbook if he was to leave.

 

Does this also apply to a School Website or a home grown "School Learning Portal / VLE" ????? These both are based on WordPress with free plug ins. He would like to know where we stand.

Our technician spent hundreds of paid hours creating these, his question is what is to stop someone else or our old tech recreating this in a few minutes for another School?

The hours of development was done here whilst being paid by the School.

 

There is no copyright in place, and as everything is based on free software, does anyone have an idea where the School stands?

 

Thanks in advance

[mthomas08]

Tough one that, we had been in a similar position our older VLE was brought in by the Music head and he has done 99.9% of all the work on it. If he left where would we stand because technically its not owned by the school unless we have some legal documentation on it (which I really dont think we have). He has full control over it and no one can touch it without his permission, worst thing is this is all externally hosted and again nothing to do with the school.

 

Would be interesting to know where the official standing is on this, if its all on an internal server - technically the school owns it? or should?

[pcstru]

There is no copyright in place, and as everything is based on free software, does anyone have an idea where the School stands?

There will be copyright in place. Copyright comes into being at the point a 'work' is created. You don't need to explicitly claim copyright for it to be copyright (This post for instance is my copyright, I don't actually need a notice to say so). A 'work' can be a variety of things that are unique and are somehow recorded. So text (including significant portions of program code/configuration files etc), music, film, images etc - all have copyright granted to the creator at the point that the works are created. If the work was created as a normal and expected part of your employment, then the copyright of the work is assigned to your employer.

[camel]

There will be copyright in place. Copyright comes into being at the point a 'work' is created. You don't need to explicitly claim copyright for it to be copyright (This post for instance is my copyright, I don't actually need a notice to say so). A 'work' can be a variety of things that are unique and are somehow recorded. So text (including significant portions of program code/configuration files etc), music, film, images etc - all have copyright granted to the creator at the point that the works are created. If the work was created as a normal and expected part of your employment, then the copyright of the work is assigned to your employer.

 

Absolutely true.

 

So in effect, those of us who are county council employees, works created are essentially copyright of the County Council for works created within maintained schools, depending on the legal entity, e.g. Academies/free schools individually would be the employer.

 

If I remember back to my uni days, we had to sign a document stating that anything created within/for uni was under university copyright too. I can't remember the exact wording though...