united-states state-university
Is showing college material illegal?
<p>My question is the title, the rest is just an explanation. I'm a student at Penn State University in the US. Is it illegal for me to show course material to a public audience like on my YouTube channel? When I was in High School I always wondered how difficult college assignments would be and how they would look, so now I want to kill that curiosity for others by showing the entire class' assignments etc. etc. and stuff. To my knowledge I don't know of anyone who's done that except for outdated content like from the 1800s that no one cares about anymore.</p>
<p>So, is it illegal for me to share course content online?</p>

<p>Course assignments, like practically every other piece of written content created in the past 100 years or so, are copyrighted.  You cannot copy or redistribute them without the permission of the copyright holder.  In most cases that would be the course instructor, but it could also be the university, or the publisher of a commercial book or other resource where the questions came from.</p>
<p>The instructor might be happy to give you permission if you ask - many professors would be pleased to have their creations reach a wider audience.</p>
<p>In any case, it is perfectly legal to talk about the assignment you were given, as long as you do not copy or replicate the text of the assignment itself.  Reading it verbatim or with trivial alterations would be a problem, but describing it completely in your own words doesn't infringe copyright.</p>
<p>A separate issue is what is allowed by your university rules.  University rules aren't laws, but you can still be punished academically if you break them (grade penalties, suspension, expulsion, etc).  The university might have a policy against sharing, or even discussing, assignments without permission.  This might include forbidding actions that the law itself allows.  In particular, they might forbid you from talking about your <em>solutions</em> to the assignments, which copyright law would have no problem with (your solution is your own creative work, and the copyright on it belongs to you).  So again, ask your instructor what they would allow.</p>
<p>Also, academic ethics (which again is not a law, but might be enforced by your university) would generally require that you give proper attribution to the author of the assignment you are discussing.</p>
<p>Note that there are plenty of online collections of so-called &quot;open courseware&quot;, where the university deliberately makes their course materials public,   under some sort of open license such as Creative Commons.  <a href="https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MIT's repository</a> is one of the most famous.  So if you can't get permission to use the materials from your Penn State courses, you could always make videos about MIT's assignments instead.</p>

<p>Generally no.  Displaying a large part of the contents of a textbook might be an infringement of the copyright on that text, unless permission was obtained. But showing how a particular class lesson would work does not seem likely to infringe any copyright. If the teacher has written out a detailed script for a lesson, then copying the words of that script might be infringement, but paraphrasing them would not be.</p>
<p>I might add that I have seen quite a few broadcast classes on television -- it used to be a not uncommon if specialized genre, pre-internet. I don't know if it has been done on YouTube, but I would be surprised if it has not.</p>
<p>If this would be under US law than &quot;educational purposes&quot; are one of the core reasons for fair use. That alone does not make something fair use, but it tends to weigh heavily towards fair use in any analysis.</p>
