I was browsing eBay the other day for non OU related stuff (not important what it was) and just on a whim did a search on ‘open university’ to see whether any interesting course materials (ie the printed books etc) were being sold – in the past I’ve gone to University Book Search for them, and bought a couple of sets, namely D309 (?) Cognitive Psychology, and D317 Social Psychology – but was finding that it was generally whole sets of material being sold there, and for quite a high price a lot of the time (the student selling them, not UBS, sets the price I believe!). Really I’m more interested in ‘dipping in’ to individual units of things I find interesting, otherwise if I wanted to work through ALL the materials I’d most likely sign up for the course itself and get the credit for it 
Never mind that I have T211 or M257 to start next month, or any of the myriad other things I’ve made a bit of a resolution to do this year. The new and unexpected always has more appeal!
Anyway, whilst searching on this I did notice quite a few sets of actual TMAs being offered on there. (Important note: I would like to make it explicitly clear that I am not intending to carry out plagiarism myself, and do not condone it. That should be clear from reading other comments around the blog anyway though, but you never know!) Out of curiosity I clicked on a couple of them, again obviously not intending to buy, but just to see what people are saying about them and on what basis (if any) they are justifying making them available when I would have thought this was against the rules. (OU regulations say something along the lines of – it’s not allowed to make them available to encourage or enable plagiarism – check the stated wording for yourself in your documents if you need to know the exact situation.) Mostly people seem to be saying that they’re a study aid or to get an idea of what the course is like, and that you’re not allowed to use them for plagiarism etc, and that the copyright still belongs to him/her (ie the person selling them).
I could go on about the plagiarism situation for quite a long time so will just leave it at this: it’s wrong., both rule-wise and morally, and shame on you for cheating in such a way. What I’m more interested in though is the copyright aspect – whether it’s correct to say that the person selling the TMAs (if they wrote them) still owns the copyright – as I’ve believed for quite a few years that writing something in the course of one’s studies or employment etc – means that the copyright will belong to the organisation rather than the student. Now though, I’m not sure in relation to TMAs etc (think it is the case for employment though) as a quick Google search (method of finding truth instantly!) suggests that copyright in work produced by an individual needs to be explicitly ‘assigned’ (by filling in a form etc or some other means) and that it is not considered good practice to force students contractually to assign copyright in all the writing they produce in the course of their studies. Bearing all this in mind it seems unlikely to me that I have assigned copyright to the OU in anything I’ve written and so if I did want to re-use it (not selling TMAs etc, but I mean re-using some of the wording or whatever in a completely different context) it might be more possible than I’d thought.
I don’t recall signing anything like this (it’s possible that I could have, but think I would have remembered it) so perhaps it means I do own the copyright in things I’ve produced in my studies… I’m not intending to sell TMAs or anything like that, but especially with courses such as Design (which as you may know if you’ve been following this blog I am starting next month) where you are actually working with a real idea rather than just blabbering on “about” something, I personally think it would be pretty poor form if innovative ideas students came up with (and related stuff such as business plans etc) became the copyright of the OU so that that idea couldn’t be re-used as the student wouldn’t own the copyright so would be in the bizarre situation of being in breach (I had assumed) so had resigned myself to churning out a ‘rubbish’ idea that no one would want to actually use and then writing off said idea from being able to be used again. Because what if just due to a very small chance something turned out to be a ‘killer’ idea and very lucrative etc… sticky situation.
Probably the best way to proceed with this (bearing in mind I’m quite risk averse especially in the last few years) is to have a quick consultation with a legal type person if it does seem at any point that an idea is likely to be a ‘goer’ and have potential, just to check on the copyright and intellectual property (patent etc) situation.
I realise now that this is (mostly subconsciously) what’s been putting me off doing the more ‘creative’ type of courses, both at the OU and elsewhere (e.g. Open College of the Arts), because somehow I’d formed this idea about copyright and IP and hadn’t actually looked it up before as I was afraid what I’d find out. It’s much easier psychologically just to go along putting obstacles in the way and saying things like ‘I can’t do this because of X” where X is some rule or whatever that’s external – even if I’ve just come up with it myself by assuming or misreading etc. Because once you do actually find out the facts of the situation, it then becomes one thing or the other, rather than being undetermined (like the popular conception of Schroedinger’s cat etc). Actually I only really realised this whilst typing it (happens quite a lot, most of my thought is formed externally..) and it’s quite liberating to finally make these sort of assumptions and psychological quirks explicit!
** All the usual rules apply to this post: I am not a lawyer – do not construe any of this as legal advice since it is not legal advice – I am discussing plagiarism and copyright in the abstract and do not intend to violate anything – I am not selling TMAs and do not condone it – my current understanding of the copyright situation is just based on a quick look around the Web and may well be wrong, etc.
The reason I filed this under the ‘Things that could be done better’ category was only implicit in the post, but what I was getting at was that if a normal person like myself can find these TMAs for sale on eBay when they are not even specifically looking for TMAs – why are the OU not routinely ‘spidering’ eBay and similar, and tracking down the people making them available? A few reasons I can think of are:
1. they actually are tracking them down (not sure if true)
2. it’s not actually against the rules unless they are made available for plagiarism – not sure about this
3. OU don’t know they are being sold on there – unlikely
4. data protection or whatever means they can’t get hold of the people’s details… possible in this age of individual freedom!
5. considered unethical or similar
Especially in the current recession climate of job losses etc, I and I’m sure a lot of other people am actually quite uncomfortable to think that there are people out there getting degrees illegitimately by plagiarising and copying instead of coming up with their own content. I’ve done things properly so why shouldn’t other people!
Their wording on plagiarism is a little loose these days but that aside, it does cover selling TMAs and, if they could be tracked down, those listing theirs on ebay would, in principle, be subject to disciplinary action.
However, there’s at least two personal sites that I know of where the owner has simply published their entire set of TMAs for various courses. From my reading of the current plagiarism rule that would actually be OK.
Does it really matter that those two sites exist though? Well, no, because the OU run their anti-plagiarism software over “a sample” (presumably 100% these days) of submitted TMAs so one would assume that copying from those ones would be picked up anyway. There is one big plus point of having those sites around though: they provide a handy “what’s being asked for” guide for those new to the OU which is something that the OU themselves never put out. That’s particularly handy in the case of one of those as it’s for psychology courses and in a lot of cases people are coming to L2 in that as their very first course. Thus they provide a useful example of the “simple” stuff eg just how to lay out a TMA.