I would like to know where to localize on the Web the list of B2B English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Portals offering educational content for EFL.
I would also appreciate comments on the following: I run SME language school offering foreign language classes (English, French, Spanish, German, Polish) to corporate clients using educational material books available in the market. We photocopy the units and use them in the class. As I understand this is not a copy right infringment as we are not re-selling it for comercial purposes. It serves our educational purposes. Now, does the same apply to e-learning? Could we - without infringing copy rights - use the educational material available on the market, have it adopted and programmed for our educational puropses, host it in our server, hang it on the web and offer it to our corporate clients?
Matthew Boruch
One Response
B2B
How does your business work then? You say you are not selling the information for commercial gain and therefore not breaching copyright but unless you are running a completely free service payment must pass hands somewhere so copyright will be breached.
It sounds like you are buying one book and then photocopying it, circulating it and using it with your, no doubt, fee paying students. Of course you are breaching the copyright terms!
Copy right does not only apply to the reselling of the material it also applies to copying ( photcopying), passing it off as your own work, almost any mention of it etc.
I would suggest you desist from this practice immediately or run the risk of an action for infringement of copyright. All e-learning will be protected in the same way.
Copyright is there to protect the ideas of the person who thought of them and placed them on the web or in print. It protects the intellectual property of that work that is useful to others and therefore valuable. Adapting e-learning to suit your own business ends is a clear case of theft ( in copyright terms) so you need to start developing your own material!It might serve my educational purposes to use other’s work but I don’t because of the protection involved and the penalties imposed for doing this. This is why most training providers/consultancies work so hard, at so great a cost, in developing their own material.
Training By Design Global Ltd