The intellectual property of content published in virtual campuses: what legal and technological aspects should be considered?

Abstract

Nowadays, all universities has learning management systems (LMS) to support their academic offer, for traditional, distance, or blended learning modalities. These LMS platforms are known as Virtual Campuses, and they have been transforming progresivelly in institutional repositories of educational digital content. Content accommodated in the virtual campuses is, mainly, educational resources produced by teachers from the university and for students of the same university, and, the access is restricted to the own university community. Besides, universities are obliged to have open digital content repositories and to broadcast their academic production supported by public fundings. However, the autor rignts’ entities claim to universities the payment of copyrights, adducing that there is an infraction for teaching use in the virtual campuses. But, the millions of educational resourses published by teachers and students in the virtual campuses, and continuasly updating, make implosible the control by any institutional service. So,the copyrights entities ask fot the payment of a fee, not for the actually protected resources, but just according the size of the institution. For this reason, in this work we present an analysis of legal framework on autor rights and intelectual property of digital contents at universities, in particular, into the Spanish context. Moreover, we present different technological solutions which allows to promote the open access in universities. In particular, we present the case of University of La Laguna, the different solutions that we have carried out from 2015, including the development of a technological tool for Moodle that allow the identification by teachers of the rights about content published into the virtual campus.