This section calls out issues that have been of particular concern or areas where recommended practices have been revised since the last Copyright Reminder. 

Dissertations

Faculty need to be aware that the Office of Technology Licensing has determined that publication of a dissertation qualifies as a public disclosure per article 35 U.S.C. 102 of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (ie for purposes of patent filings).  This is true for both print and electronic dissertations, and is true even when the dissertation is embargoed so that access is limited to the Stanford community.  It is critical that faculty and doctoral candidates work together well in advance of the candidate’s dissertation filing to ensure that timing concerns regarding publication of data are resolved. 

Similarly, faculty and doctoral candidates need to coordinate to ensure publication of the dissertation does not conflict with other publication agreements related to material included in the dissertation. 

MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), distributed through systems like Class2Go, Coursera or Venture Lab, became quite popular in 2012.  Faculty or staff interested in offering a public online course should register their interest at http://bit.ly/StanfordFacOnlineCourse at least two months in advance of a potential launch date.  Normally, public courses will be launched once per quarter, subject to various considerations.  Faculty developing online courses will be asked to sign a Course Development Agreement (CDA) and should allow enough lead time to work out copyright, accessibility, and other issues.  Faculty creating MOOCs need to pay special attention to copyright concerns, as the issues can be complex, and rights that you might have obtained to post material on CourseWork or other local course management systems do not apply in these larger systems.  Similarly, the face-to-face teaching exemptions that allow you to use material in your classroom do not apply.  The Office of General Counsel has put together Online Course Copyright & Privacy Guidelines, which are available on this site.  (see Stanford Online Course Guidelines).