Intellectual Property on Campus: Students' Rights and Responsibilities

Conclusion: Legal, Ethical, and Pedagogical Considerations

104 Conclusion: Legal, Ethical, and Pedagogical Considerations Both educators and their students have ethical duties regarding how they use intellectual products. Both have ethical duties to use creative products with concern for their creators or controllers, students have ethical duties to treat educators’ and their institutions’ intellectual products with respect, and educators and educational institutions have a special—fiduciary—duty to handle students’ work, their experience on campuses, and their training with care. And in cases where students can substantiate unethical treatment of their work by professors, they may be able to resort to a new development in the law by claiming breach of fiduciary duty (Astala 33). To substantiate a claim of breach of fiduciary duty, a student must show a close relationship with the professor, in which she or he relied on the professor for help, advice, or support, determined by means of consideration of a variety of factors including the degree of affinity between them; differences in age, health, mental abilities, education, and business experience; and the extent of trust elicited from the student (34). In addition to Joany Chou’s success in her claim in Chou v. Univ. of Chicago, discussed in chapter 1, others’ claims of breach of fiduciary duty have been supported by courts in holdings as well as in dicta (Rainey v. Wayne State Univ., Johnson v. Schmidt). In claims of breach of fiduciary duty, the focus is on poor judgment of a professor, but many other rights and responsibilities attached to educators and students are the same or +HUULQJWRQ&RQFOXVLRQLQGG $0 C O N C L U S I O N 105 similar. Differences arise because students and educators may interact with responsibilities under different contextual parameters. These are noted and discussed below, treating students’ rights and responsibilities first, educators’ next, and the interaction of the two, last. Students’ Ethical and Legal Responsibilities With students’ rights come responsibilities as participants in a democratic society, and these responsibilities include ethical responses to using intellectual products created by others. Students represent themselves not only by the work they create but by the uses they make of others’ work. They represent themselves and display integrity through attribution to sources they use in the work they develop; they represent their credibility and authority through effective use of sources as support for ideas, argument, and creative thought processes developed in the process of learning; and they represent a legal stance in the ways they use work that is protected under intellectual property law. Students who seek respect for the work they create must respond to other creators’ works with respect if they expect their professors and other users to show consideration to theirs. Their experience with intellectual products in educational settings forms the basis for finding the balance between intellectual product use and protection that is necessary to uphold constitutional intent of the intellectual property provision. Finding this balance can be difficult for students in technical communication and fields like it as they prepare for workplace authorship practices in which single-sourced work (materials developed by a team) and collaborative authorship are common. After finding that technical communication textbooks likened plagiarism to theft and stated that using the Internet leads to plagiarism, one author wrote that students in technical communication are sent a too stringent message (Reyman 62–63). But assimilating understanding of balance is part of the imprinting process that shapes students’ perceptions of law and society. Learning to interact ethically with intellectual products also is necessary for students to understand how their interactions in society affect the way both the law and society itself are shaped. The Supreme Court supports dialogic interaction on campuses and makes clear that campuses act, in essence, as training grounds for new citizens who will shape the nation in the future. The Court notes that universities play a “vital role in a democracy” by enabling a “robust exchange of ideas” that allows its inhabitants to discover truth “out of a multitude of tongues,” “making the university a ‘marketplace of ideas’” (Keyishian v. Bd. of Regents). +HUULQJWRQ&RQFOXVLRQLQGG $0 C O N C L U S I O N 106 Through their intellectual interactions, students are learning that they do and will affect the shape of the country, so understanding how to maintain balance is a particularly important and essential part of their education . Students learn to treat intellectual...