Who Owns What?

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Dinkar Jain was hired at the University of California at [sic] Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management in 2023 to teach “Management in the Age of AI” — a course he had developed to give current and aspiring management executives the insights on artificial intelligence they needed to lead their companies... 

Once approved and launched, the course proved popular, and the university asked Jain to teach it again. But when the university would not fulfill Jain’s requests for things like a personal research assistant and the title of “senior fellow,” he decided not to teach again. When Kramer referenced the need to find another faculty member to teach the AI course, Jain responded that the course was his intellectual property and “not something that I am just going to hand over to a new instructor” — a comment that neither Kramer nor Felix acknowledged in their reply. UCLA continued the course. They hired another instructor, Cy Khormaee, to teach it...

Jain asked [Khormaee] to send over a copy of the syllabus he was using, and Khormaee obliged...

To Jain’s naked eye, the similarities were striking. Excluding the parts of the syllabus with boilerplate language about matters like plagiarism and absences, Jain ran Khormaee’s document through plagiarism-detection software. When the software identified several similarities, it was “the first time that I discovered that this is problematic,” Jain said. At the bottom of the page, Khormaee had added his own copyright mark...

Over the next few months, Jain shared his grievances with the Anderson dean, UCLA’s interim chancellor, and the compliance officer and provost from the University of California system. He either received no response or was directed to another department...

But [a university] spokesperson did cite what appears to be the crux of the dispute: the University of California system’s policy on ownership of course materials. It says that while the instructor may own the copyright to their course materials, the university has a fully paid-up, royalty-free, perpetual, and nonexclusive worldwide license to “use and update certain course-approval documents, such as a course description, a statement of learning objectives, and a topical outline, with the aim of maintaining course continuity.” ...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/he-wrote-a-course-syllabus-is-it-still-his.

The matter is yet to be resolved.