This guide and the resources included within are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, except as otherwise noted. Questions and requests may be directed to Meaghan Shannon, Copyright Librarian at Queen's University: meaghan.shannon@queensu.ca.
There are a number of course content sharing sites that are operating online. Some look like social media platforms, some claim to facilitate peer tutoring, and all provide an online space for students to upload and share copies of their assignments and other documents, including course materials: faculty-created content like handouts and slides, publisher-issued supplemental and instructional materials like slides and questions from text banks, and case studies, articles, and book chapters that had been licensed for use within a course. Course content sharing sites often allow for a limited number of documents to be previewed before an account must be created or a subscription must be initiated, this often involves the payment of access or subscription fees. Students are often provided with the option of uploading x number of documents as an alternative to paying such fees. Unfortunately, this often results in students uploading and sharing content to which they do not own the intellectual property rights. Course content sharing sites do not have vetting systems or screening practices in place. Instead, they have implemented takedown policies and rely on intellectual property rights owners to identify and report instances in which their content and works have been made available through the sites without their authorization.
The content that faculty created for the facilitation of their courses is protected by copyright and Queen's faculty retain the rights (economic and moral) to the content and works that they create. The Copyright Advisory Office offers a Takedown Notice service for Queen's faculty who have found their faculty-created content or works on course content sharing sites and would like their faculty-created content or works removed from such sites. To make use of this service, please include the following information in an email to qcopy@queensu.ca:
- Your Name,
- Course Code and Course Name,
- Name of the Course Content Sharing Site,
- Links to the webpages within the course content sharing site on which your faculty-created content and/or works have been made available, and
- Please include the following statement: As the author and copyright owner of the identified content and/or works, I authorize the Copyright Advisory Office at Queen's University to act on my behalf by issuing a takedown notice to the identified course content sharing site.
You will receive a confirmation email from the Copyright Advisory Office when the takedown notice has been issued to the course content sharing site on your behalf.
For information about copyright statements, disclaimers, and Creative Commons licenses that can be affixed to your faculty-created content and works, please see our Authors' Rights & Course Materials page.
Please note that students retain the rights (economic and moral rights) to the work that they create. While it may be discouraging to find completed assignments pertaining to your courses available to other students through course content sharing sites, the Copyright Advisory Office cannot issue takedown notices for students' content and works. Similarly, publishers own the rights to their textbooks and supplemental and instructional materials so they will exercise and enforce their rights as they see fit.