Books copyrights, how to avoid getting into problems?

[SultanTech]

Hello everyone,

My name is Sultan, and this is going to be my first attempt at teaching online.

In my first course (which I am still preparing at the moment), I want to use a book as a reference for the curriculum, and as a guideline for students to know where are the contents of this course are coming from.

I need your advice on the subject, am I going to get into trouble by using the book in that way? And what are the things that I should pay attention to to avoid such things?

Thank you in advance,

Sultan

[Thor · Accepted solution]

You can refer to it, but you can't require students to use a certain book.

The course should stand on its own.

Best way to ensure no issue would be to contact the author and get permission to do the course and referring to their book.

For some of my courses I contacted the certification provider and got written permission to use their logo. Good thing I did, 2 years later their legal department contacted me, telling me to remove it from all my materials. Since I had the letter from their legal department allowing it, I sent the email back to them and they said .. hmm OK then. 

[FawadKhan172]

Hi Thor.  Being an instructor did we are not allowed to teach a book like biology text book etc without permission of author? Also we give our own explanation and we didn't copy the book words for words but we are trying to explain the book in a best way. Also for a lecture if we use more than 1 books and YouTube lectures to fully understand the topics than its too hard to take permission from everyone being an instructor. Also we will add these sources in bibliography. Kindly guide me 

[ThomasMitchell]

No. It’s called derivative work - and it violates copyright law. 

[FawadKhan172]

how can educators and instructors on Udemy balance the need to use existing works and ideas in their teaching with the requirement to respect copyright law and obtain permission from authors and creators, when it's often impractical or impossible to obtain permission for every source used in a course?

[ThomasMitchell]

You don’t. You use your brain. Shouldn’t be a problem if you are an actual expert in your field. 

The bigger question is why do you need to rely on someone else’s work to begin with?