Dean's Brief 7 · Monday, October 19, 2026
Copyright, AI, and Your Course Materials
The decision: Give faculty three rules they can apply without calling counsel, and route everything else to one person who can. Copyright confusion is now the second most common AI question instructional designers get, after grading.
What is happening
Faculty are feeding textbook chapters into AI to make study guides, generating images for slides, and pasting student work into tools whose terms claim a license to it. Instructional design teams are asking the AI in Education list for anyone with copyright expertise, and the honest replies came from people who said "not a lawyer, but." That is the state of the field: the law is moving (the 2025 fair-use rulings on training data went in different directions for different defendants), the vendor terms change quarterly, and nobody on campus owns the question.
A dean does not need to resolve the law. A dean needs faculty to stop guessing.
Three moves
- Three rules for faculty. Do not upload a publisher's materials to a tool outside the campus license; the chapter is theirs, not yours. Treat AI-generated text and images as unowned: you may use them, you cannot claim copyright in them, and you should say they are AI-made. Never paste student work into a tool whose terms let it train on the input; that is a privacy failure before it is a copyright one.
- Name one owner. A librarian or instructional designer who holds the campus answer sheet, updates it each term, and takes the questions that do not fit the three rules. Give that person two hours a week and counsel's phone number.
- Teach it to students in one assignment. Jon Ippolito at the University of Maine built a free exercise in which students referee hypothetical AI copyright cases against recent rulings. Borrow it. Students who have argued a case remember the rules.
What to say
To faculty: "Three rules cover ninety percent of it. For the rest, ask the person whose job it is." To students: "AI output is not yours to copyright, and your work is not the tool's to keep."
Monday step
Ask your librarian whether the campus has a current one-page AI and copyright guide. If the answer is a link to a 2023 page, assign the update with a date.
Sources: AI in Education listserv, Oct. 10–12, 2026; Ippolito, J., "Recent News for AI and the Law," nmdprojects.net.