Who Owns Faculty Intellectual Property?

Back on January 14th, we had a blog post about coming issues related to faculty welfare. Included in that posting was this observation:

"With technology [in instruction] comes questions about who owns the 'intellectual property' of recorded lectures, for example. Is it the faculty member who produced them? Or the university as employer? Note that Regents often come from the private sector where if you make something for your employer, the employer owns it."*

Who owns what is a large question but typically it hasn't arisen in practice - particularly outside the sciences where valuable patents are an issue. Things such as lecture notes have been left to faculty. And things such as journal articles, books, and other creative work has been left to copyright holders. 

On January 16th, however, yours truly spotted an article describing settlement of a lawsuit at the U of Colorado-Boulder. Excerpt from the Colorado Sun:

The University of Colorado and longtime professor Patty Limerick have settled a lawsuit filed by the celebrated historian last year. Limerick, who the university fired from the Center for the American West in September 2022, sued the university in Boulder County District Court in May, arguing school officials were denying her access to her writings and scholarly works. Limerick said she filed the lawsuit after  months of attempting to access her writings. She eventually hired an attorney and filed open-records requests to help identify her work in CU’s libraries and databases. 

The school offered some electronic records but declined to give Limerick full access to all the Center of the American West records. The school last year sent Limerick a letter saying CU “is the owner of any educational materials, scholarly and artistic works” created by Limerick since she joined the faculty at the Boulder campus in 1984. 

The lawsuit marked an intellectual property fight, with Limerick hoping she could prod CU Boulder into valuing the work of its arts and humanities professors as much as it does the scholarly work of its science and engineering professors. The university argued it was not preventing Limerick from accessing her works. 

At a mediation between Limerick and the university this week, the sides reached an agreement “that Professor Limerick does in fact own her life’s work,” according to the statement from her attorneys.

“It is Limerick’s hope that this outcome will protect professors in the future from a similar ordeal,” reads a statement from her attorney announcing that she has “prevailed in a settlement of the case.” ...

Full article at https://coloradosun.com/2025/01/16/patty-limerick-cu-boulder-lawsuit-settled/.

In short, as we noted in the earlier posting, the issue of who owns what in higher ed remains open, particularly with the rise in use of online education and use of technology to deliver instruction.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/01/things-to-consider.html.