The University of Wisconsin System has temporarily paused the release of an updated copyright policy that would broaden the amount of intellectual property the university can claim from academic staff after faculty criticism.
Instead of releasing the policy, which was set to release upon approval from UW System President Jay Rothman, a working group will review public comments and proposed changes, aiming to provide feedback to the UW System Board of Regents by March.
“President Rothman is directing the establishment of a work group made up of content experts and representatives designated by shared governance leadership to review the comments and provide recommended changes to the policy,” UW Director of Media Relations Mark Pitsch told The Daily Cardinal in an email statement on Feb. 6.
When asked about the work group’s makeup and timeline, Pitsch said UW System was in the process of identifying the group.
Faculty criticize implications of policy on research ownership, AI
The policy, an updated version of an existing UW System copyright policy, first became available on UW System websites in September and removed the word “instructional” from the original title, “Copyright Instructional Materials Ownership, Use and Control,” granting UW System copyright ownership across a larger swath of material.
Other changes include determining copyright ownership based on “category of work” rather than “type of material,” removing “developmental conditions for copyright instructional materials” and adding qualifications around copyright ownership for a newly defined category of work labeled “Institutional Work.”
The complete text of the policy, which was taken down from the website, was shared with the Cardinal by the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin (AFT-Wisconsin).
AFT-Wisconsin raised multiple concerns in an open letter to UW System leadership and students in November, asserting the ownership claim “is in violation of existing policy, existing practice, and long standing traditions and principles of higher education.” A UW-Madison faculty lobbying group, PROFS, also echoed these concerns in a Dec. 9 letter.
“The existing policy has some of the strongest copyright protections for intellectual property for faculty and staff in the country,” said Jon Shelton, AFT-Wisconsin member, professor of Democracy and Justice Studies and president of UW-Green Bay academic labor union UWGB-United. “We were worried in particular about the fact that this seemed to state in writing that the UW System owned the copyright on all of the work that people had produced, including scholarly work, teaching materials, syllabi, et cetera.”
In the letter, signed by presidents and councilmembers of faculty and staff labor unions across UW System, AFT-Wisconsin urged UW System to clarify that copyright ownership of Scholarly Work should be vested with the work’s author and threatened to withhold their intellectual material from Canvas if their requests were not met.
UW System legal counsel replied to AFT-Wisconsin in an email confirming it would make revisions to the updated policy, which included updating the definition of “Scholarly Work” to include syllabi and clarifying the point that copyright ownership of “Scholarly Work” is transferred to the authors of that work — although the university is still granted access to the work to use for cases laid out later in the “Conditions of Transfer” section of the policy.
AFT-Wisconsin still had some concerns, including that their instructional materials could still be used to train artificial intelligence models, but UW System legal counsel did not respond to any further emails or requests for conversation made by AFT-Wisconsin leaders, according to Shelton.
“If [UW System] defines the legitimate business purposes of the university as training AI to teach students so they no longer need professors, I don't see anything in this policy that would prohibit that,” Shelton said.
Working group composition, specific policy updates raise concerns
With the introduction of the working group, it is unclear whether the revisions mentioned in the email are guaranteed to remain, according to Shelton. Although AFT-Wisconsin is composed of university faculty and staff, none of its members have yet been selected to be in the working group, though one board member of the UW-Madison faculty lobbying group PROFS is on the committee: Nancy Kendall, professor of Educational Policy Studies, who did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
“After I got this letter from [UW System legal counsel], they then basically retracted the policy and started over, I guess, with this working group,” Shelton said. “So I have no idea what's actually going to come out of this. Are those new safeguards even going to be in there? This has all been a black box, and again, they're not talking to the people who had the concerns in the first place.”
Both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) confirmed the original draft of the updated policy would infringe upon the AAUP’s statements on Copyright and Intellectual Property, according to the letter. These concerns were sufficiently recognized by the revisions that UW System legal counsel sent to AFT-Wisconsin, according to Shelton, although the legal counsel disputed that even the original updated policy infringed upon those guidelines.
Dorothea Salo, a scholarly communication librarian and member of the United Faculty and Academic Staff labor union at UW-Madison, spoke about her discomfort with the updated policy at a UFAS-sponsored event on Feb. 4 titled, “Who Owns Your Academic Work?” Salo could not locate the text of the policy, and expressed worry at the difficulty of finding information on the policy specifics — aside from the changelog and a list of frequently asked questions, no other details are available on the UW System website.
“Even if this was a mistake, even if this was well-intentioned in some ways… I really expect the Regents to do better,” Salo said, adding the issue of demarcation between research products and instructional products has existed for a long time. “Faculty have thought of themselves as independent operators within a university… while the employer does incentivize research production, it does not specify that content in the way that a typical work-for-hire environment would.”
A work-for-hire environment is a term built into United States copyright law. Essentially, if an employee is hired to produce material that could be considered copyrightable, the employer becomes the copyright holder. Anything fixed in a tangible medium of expression can be copyrightable, including software, digital files, essays, papers, books, music and recordings.
But universities operate somewhat differently. Because faculty largely dictate research work rather than the university administration, these faculty members have been allowed to hold their own copyrights, according to Salo. The new policy would affect not only faculty but also instructional academic staff, potentially limiting the scope of their ability to control what their academic materials are used for.
“We’re sitting here, by the way, because this is a union-sponsored event,” Salo said during the event. “If the fruits of our labor are basically being taken away from us, we have concerns.”
Both letters, and Salo, expressed concern that their course materials could be taken without consent and used in online courses that the original authors of the course material would not be involved in. Other concerns included the possibility that low-skilled workers or AI could be made to proctor the original author’s course, reducing its value to students.
“Whether it's Jay Rothman strongly suggesting that campuses with large numbers of low-income students cut majors that supposedly don't give people jobs, or UW System’s new policy that senior level searches for UW System employees no longer have to have a search committee… There's a consolidation of power and a deficit of trust with the UW System,” Shelton said.
Reporting contributed by Staff Writer Ted Hyngstrom
