Uploading Google Docs on Teachers Pay Teachers
Julie Reulbach doesn't sell resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, an online marketplace where educators can make coin on their lesson plans and classroom materials. Withal, she often sees her work for sale there.
"Everytime I check, I discover something," said Reulbach, a high school math teacher at a private school in Concord, Due north.C., who has published an instructional weblog since 2010. She scans TpT for work from her blog about once every vi months. Her site is nether a NonCommercial Creative Commons license, and then anyone can use, edit, or share her materials—just they are not supposed to sell them.
It's happening anyway. And Reulbach'southward experience isn't unique.
Most a dozen educators who have used or are knowledgeable nearly the site told Education Week that TpT has a widespread trouble with copyright infringement. Teachers said sellers had lifted passages verbatim from their lessons and copied entire pages without permission. While the company provides a reporting mechanism for infractions, information technology leaves the policing to the rights holders themselves.
The controversy over stolen work has also fueled a larger ideological rift in the pedagogy customs: the division between those who think it's fine for teachers to make money off their difficult work, and those who believe educators should share materials with their colleagues for free.
In a statement, TpT CEO Joe The netherlands said that the company takes the protection of intellectual property seriously.
"TpT strictly prohibits its sellers from listing textile that infringes on the intellectual property rights of others, and we have no desire to take such material on TpT," he said.
But educators and authors say the company should be doing more than to combat what they run across equally a systemic failure to protect teachers and others who create materials.
'They Shouldn't Exist Selling It'
When Reulbach sees sellers attempting to make money off of lessons she's created, she reaches out to them and asks them to have her materials down. "Normally, people contact me and say, 'I'm really sorry,'" and remove the resource from their store, she said.
But before this year, she got into an argument with a teacher-seller that veered into the public sphere. Seeing one of her graphic organizers for sale in a TpT store, Reulbach filed a notice with the company'southward copyright team and commented on the listing. She also reached out to the seller, Theresa Ellington, on Twitter, asking her to remove the product.
The two went back and along on the social media platform, with Ellington saying that she had reworked the lesson from a Pinterest post and Reulbach maintaining that the resource was a direct re-create of hers.
Screenshots Reulbach took of the worksheet from the store are about identical to the version in her original weblog post, including the same formatting and equations. Ane moving-picture show published with Ellington's production fifty-fifty shows a photo of the organizer filled out in Reulbach'south handwriting.
Eventually, Ellington, a math teacher and educational consultant, removed the graphic organizer from her store. Just in an interview with Education Week, Ellington said she didn't believe that the resources ever infringed on Reulbach's copyright. She said she made changes to the Pinterest mail service and sold it and then that other teachers could accept access to the updated version. (She also said no 1 ever actually bought a copy from her.)
Reulbach frequently finds pictures of her work posted on Pinterest, she told Education Week, where teachers might assume that the images don't vest to anyone. "Merely evidently, if they didn't create it, they shouldn't be selling it and trying to make money off of it," she said.
Other teachers say they've unexpectedly found their work being sold on TpT likewise.
When Chicago teacher Tess Raser found out that her 6th graders would exist seeing the moving picture "Black Panther" as a course, she saw an opportunity for a powerful lesson. Raser created an accompanying curriculum for the movie, covering a wide swath of history, social studies, and folklore: African kingdoms, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Afrofeminism, and Afrofuturism.
She posted the resource online, and information technology went viral. Raser'south work was featured on the technology and scientific discipline fiction site Gizmodo and on the site for Blavity, a media visitor geared to black millenials. Teaching Tolerance, a social justice and anti-bias plan that provides gratis resources for educators, also highlighted it as recommended reading. While access to the Google md with the curriculum was costless, Raser asked that those who could pay her practise and so via Venmo or the Cash App, 2 online payment services. She also posted the resource for auction on her own TpT store.
Months later, a friend emailed her—another TpT seller had listed a resources with content almost identical to her own, she said. A preview page from the seller'south lesson shows the same objectives around understanding colonialism and a similar pic-matching action. Raser emailed TpT to written report the seller and posted nearly the incident on Twitter. And though the seller did remove the resource from her store, Raser didn't experience that the problem had been resolved.
"I was similar, OK, well, you still demand to compensate me because you've been paid for work that I created," she said. "I don't intendance that information technology'southward deleted—you lot shouldn't take put information technology up in the offset place."
Raser said she left comments on the seller's other listings request for payment and emailed the company inquiring nigh compensation. But TpT told her that beyond removing the resource, at that place wasn't annihilation the company could practice. Raser could get a lawyer, the company told her, if she wanted to pursue a case against the seller.
TpT doesn't intervene copyright claims. The visitor complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which updated copyright constabulary to accost publication and distribution on the net. The law gives websites that host tertiary-political party content, like TpT, what's chosen a "safe harbor." When sellers on the platform postal service material that infringes on someone else's copyright, the company is not held financially liable.
In order to merits this legal protection, TpT has to give copyright holders a way to flag infringing content and accept it taken down. Anyone who thinks a TpT seller has listed his or her copyrighted cloth can submit a DMCA takedown notice with the site. Every product has a "report this resource" choice, which leads to an electronic class, or users can also email the company directly.
On its website, TpT says that if it receives a DMCA notice with all of the required data included, information technology will remove infringing content. The company would not say how many DMCA notices it receives on a yearly ground.
And the burden is on teachers to file infringement complaints—not on TpT to constabulary seller content. TpT doesn't independently review the content on the site, in part because it's difficult for the company to know what agreements or licenses individual sellers have. For example, a seller using big, verbatim passages of someone else's work could be infringing on copyright—or might have permission from the original author to use those sections for commercial purposes.
For Raser, the seller's silence was peculiarly astonishing, given the subject matter of her materials. "Literally, it's curriculum on colonization and the legacy of slavery," she said. It was "ludicrous," Raser said, that someone would take resources created by a black woman on those topics, pass them off as his or her ain, and profit off of them. The seller, who is merely identifiable by screenname, did not return several requests for comment.
After Raser commented on the seller's folio asking for compensation, TpT told Raser that it had received reports of her harassing a member of the site. If the company received more of these reports against her, the electronic mail read, TpT would suspend or deactivate her business relationship. The seller'south account is still alive.
Public Pressure
Some who've had their content lifted say they see public pressure as their best recourse.
Reulbach, the North Carolina teacher, said the reporting procedure through TpT tin can be wearisome, and contacting the seller directly sometimes yields a faster result.
But Ellington, whom Reulbach confronted on Twitter, said she felt that Reulbach was wrong to handle the incident publicly. "I felt like information technology was more than cyberbullying than legitimately two people, ii teachers, two professionals speaking most, 'Hey, this is an issue,'" she said.
When TpT did respond to Reulbach, information technology was only to say the visitor would annotation Ellington's infraction in its records.
Reulbach'south social media callout did have another effect: Information technology led to an avalanche of Tweets from other bloggers who'd had like experiences.
Lisa Bejarano, a one-time high school math teacher who now works for the online graphing calculator company Desmos, was i of these bloggers. Bejarano has seen resources from her web log sold by other users, but she said information technology'south non worth the energy for her to fight stolen work. She'southward reached out to sellers when similarities to her piece of work have been pointed out to her by friends or colleagues, but she doesn't go looking for infractions.
"Usually as a teacher, you're but and so busy trying to grade and plan and teach that policing is the terminal priority," she said.
Investigating possible infringement tin carry a fiscal cost for teachers, likewise. Browsers on TpT tin only run into a pocket-sized option of preview pages from resource that they oasis't purchased, so it can exist necessary to buy a product to confirm a suspicion that it'south copied from another piece of work, said Bejarano.
"My perspective is always that if that teacher is that desperate to make a couple extra bucks that they need to go to these lengths, and then they have bigger issues that I'g not going to fix," she said.
The company says it will close the accounts of sellers who are reported multiple times for copyright infringement, only wouldn't say how many private infractions it would need to receive confronting someone before taking this step.
Several teachers argued that TpT didn't have an incentive to police the site, because the company profits off of every lesson sold. Information technology takes a 45 percent commission from every lesson purchased from a regular seller and a 20 pct commission from every sale from a "premium" seller—a paid membership tier that costs about $threescore a year.
"Teachers Pay Teachers is making money off of copyrighted textile, and they're putting it on the responsibility of the teachers who created the fabric to get chase that downwardly, and make sure it comes off. And that'south what makes me aroused," said Reulbach. "It'southward not about me. Information technology's about a corporation that's making money off of copyrighted material."
In a statement, Kingdom of the netherlands said the company has "no desire" to accept material that infringes copyright listed on TpT.
Ethics of Selling vs. Sharing
When TpT offset started in 2006, a controversial debate launched forth with it: Is information technology ethical for teachers to accuse each other for lessons and resources, or should they share their creations with each other for free?
TpT has been heralded equally a way for underpaid educators to brand extra coin—media coverage has often spotlighted teachers who have pulled in six-figure profits.
Many of the problems on Teachers Pay teachers and similar sites arise merely because there's defoliation around the laws for creating, sharing, and selling intellectual material, including lesson plans and classroom activities.
"People don't know, and why would they know?" said Carrie Russell, the senior program director for public policy and advocacy at the American Library Clan.
For teachers who aren't certain what their rights are, here are 3 general tips:
• Copyright protection begins at the bespeak of creation: As soon as a teacher finishes a piece of work, she holds the rights.
• Having the copyright registered with the U.S. Copyright Office will provide evidence to a courtroom that the instructor is the rightful copyright holder if there were ever an infringement case. A teacher can sue without registering her copyright, but she would still demand to bear witness that she was the original author of the piece of work.
• Teachers should consider labeling their work with a copyright symbol, their proper noun, and the date of cosmos. While this won't change their legal rights, it could be a deterrent for potential infringers.
But the customers on TpT are also teachers, who are facing financial strains similar to the sellers. Should they actually have to pay for the materials needed to do their jobs?
Bringing up issues of copyright infringement on the platform can set off a pulverization-keg in the teacher-seller customs, Reulbach said. Criticism of the problem, she said, is ofttimes mistaken for criticism of all teachers who use the site.
"Information technology's a very, very sore subject for a lot of teachers, because some teachers really do need Teachers Pay Teachers to survive," Reulbach said. And teachers in underresourced schools rely on the centralized store of lessons and materials.
As TpT has become popular, opportunities for online sharing have as well developed—platforms like BetterLesson and Share My Lesson allow teachers to freely post and download material. There's also a growing sect of teachers who create and utilise HyperDocs: editable, shareable lessons hosted on Google docs. That movement's website is titled "Teachers Give Teachers."
If material is good plenty to share, it doesn't brand sense to limit teachers' and students' access to it by charging a fee, said Kevin Roughton, a middle school social studies teacher in southern California, who said he's too seen his piece of work sold on TpT without his permission. "If my work can assist the teacher next door, I'm certainly not going to accuse my colleague next door. ... I don't know why, all of the sudden, if it's [a teacher in] some other county or another state, that I'd desire to limit students from having access to that material."
Roughton publishes a blog where he shares the history lessons that he creates. Final year, he found a lesson with several lines of text lifted verbatim from his materials in a TpT store. He contacted the seller, who acknowledged the similarities and said he may take subconsciously included lines from other resource he had seen online. The seller then made changes to the product.
"Ideas in the teaching community are shared and borrowed and stolen all the time," Roughton said. But in that location'due south a divergence, he said, betwixt "stealing" an idea to use with your own students and stealing work to sell for profit. The former is good educational activity, while the latter is at all-time bad practice—and at worst, illegal.
For Reulbach, seeing her piece of work backside a paywall feels like a barrier to equity. "Teachers don't make a lot of money, and information technology only actually makes me sad that teachers are paying for something that they could become for free," she said.
Demand for Clarity
Sellers aren't merely lifting resources from private teachers—they're taking from commercially published materials as well.
Jennifer Serravallo, who'south written books on teaching reading and writing strategies, is one of the many instruction authors whose work is pop with TpT sellers. Users create activities inspired by these authors' work and resource to complement the lessons in their books. Sometimes, though, they likewise include chunks of these authors' books, which are protected by copyright.
Searching Serravallo'southward proper noun on the site returns more than 100 products, created past other users, that reference her piece of work. Some of them clearly violate copyright, she said—like word-for-word passages lifted from her books—but others she doesn't flag, like when sellers reference her list of reading goals or the championship of one of her books within their product. "I don't think that'south a problem," she said. Making these judgment calls tin be difficult, and it requires an intimate understanding of her published work, said Serravallo.
Serravallo thinks that a lot of the problems stem from teachers not understanding the ins and outs of copyright police. "The teachers who are making this stuff accept ever been horrified as soon as they've been chosen out," said Serravallo, expressing remorse that they've violated the work of an author they respect.
"I don't recall in that location's malicious intent. I don't think they're trying to be sneaky ... I recall they, in many cases, just actually don't know that what they're recreating is a violation. They call up it'southward just going to exist a helpful resource out there."
The upshot is hardly limited to Serravallo's work. Her publisher, Heinemann, recently updated the copyright language in its books, direct in response to teachers using work from its imprint on TpT and other sites: "Nosotros respectfully enquire that yous do non adapt, re-utilize, or copy anything on tertiary-party (whether for-profit or non-for-turn a profit) lesson-sharing websites."
And many teachers don't realize that they're generally violating copyright by pulling a photograph or image from the internet that they don't accept rights to use.
TpT has a "deep respect for intellectual holding rights," said TpT CEO Holland, in a statement. "To that end, we ask our sellers to certify to the ownership of their resources upon account creation." Sellers have to re-ostend they're posting original piece of work each time they upload a new resource. (TpT would non offer public comment beyond the written statement for this story.)
But copyright laws are complex and nuanced, said Serravallo. "As an writer, I take learned a lot about this because I attempt to put stuff in my books, and it'll get flagged" by the publisher's permissions department, she said. Even now, after publishing several books, she nevertheless is surprised past some of the material the department tells her she can't use. For a teacher cocky-publishing content on TpT, navigating those rules without legal counsel would be difficult, said Serravallo.
The visitor provides several informational resources on copyright and trademark, including a 3-part explanation of copyright protections, a quiz, and FAQ sections for sellers and buyers. Just teacher-sellers aren't required to review these resources or demonstrate understanding of copyright protections before they outset listing products.
Unfair Brunt?
Educators say that the company should be doing more—to simplify the reporting process, to amend brainwash sellers most copyright police force, to accept swifter action against those who suspension the rules.
Roughton, the teacher from southern California, never filed a DMCA takedown notice with the site. He said he knew that he had created the material, merely he wasn't sure if he needed to do anything to claim copyright. (He did not.)
He was worried that if his claim weren't seen as valid he could go far legal problem himself. "As a teacher, I was like, it'southward merely non worth it for a $five lesson on a website," he said.
When users exercise file DMCA notices, they take to separately report each listing. Sometimes, said Serravallo, a user will create private resource that borrow on her copyright, and so bundle all of those resources into another, distinct production. In those cases, she has to report the bundle too every bit each individual resources.
"Information technology's a lot of piece of work for the author to make something right that [someone else has] done incorrect," said Serravallo.
An alternative version of this article ran in the Jan sixteen, 2019 edition of Education Week.
A version of this article appeared in the Jan 16, 2019 edition of Education Week as On 'Teachers Pay Teachers,' Some Profit From Stolen Lessons
Source: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/on-teachers-pay-teachers-some-sellers-are-profiting-from-stolen-work/2018/12
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