Policy and Guidelines for World-Wide-Web Site: Copyright Protection

Copyright protection of published works is a complex area of law and university policy. These guidelines concern only the appropriate form of a statement of copyright on web pages designed for UMM's web site, and are not intended to serve as a guide either to the law concerning copyright protection, nor to university policies concerning either publication of information on the world wide web or an individual's intellectual property rights related to material created in an individual's capacity as an employee of the University of Minnesota.

Pages created by employees of the University of Minnesota for individual units of the university (such as individual university departments, offices, disciplines, or divisions) are considered to be owned by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. As such, a copyright statement of the form

"© Original Publication Date by the Regents of the University of Minnesota" (for example, "© 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota")

should appear in the footer material at the bottom of all unit web pages.

A copyright statement of the form

"© Original Publication Date Page Owner" (for example, "© 2001 Jane Q. Faculty")

should appear in the footer material at the bottom of any personal or professional page whose copyright protection the page owner wishes to emphasize. Examples might include creative content on a student home page or specialized instructional material posted for a course by a faculty member. If there is any question whether a page should be considered to be a unit page, or a personal/professional page hosted on UMM's site, please contact the UMM webmaster at webmaster@morris.umn.edu for guidance.

A web page is a publication, and as such the date of the copyright should be the date of first publication, and not the date the document was last modified. However, if a page undergoes substantive revisions, it may be considered to be a new publication (or a new "edition" of an extant publication), and as such a revised copyright date may be appropriate under some circumstances. One option in these situations would be to include a range of dates in the copyright statement, as in "© 1999-2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota".)