How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-24/how-a-teacher-made-1-million-selling-lesson-plans

by designtofly • 14 years ago

66 24 14 years ago

ktsmith7• 14 years ago

I'm waiting for TPT to get sued for copyright infringement. From what I've seen of plans purchased by my wife and/or her school they tend to be distributed with copy protected content that have specific licenses preventing commercial redistribution. The plans will have "source" links included at the end but the distribution of the material is still happening and only after the plan has been paid for. Since TPT gets a percentage of the sale or a yearly fee I would expect the argument to be that TPT directly profits from the copyright infringement.

jcampbell14• 14 years ago

Between the teaching exception for copyright and the DMCA safe-harbor, I am not sure the lawsuit is a slam dunk. At the end of the day, major educational publishers might be forced to submit DCMA requests or sue teachers/schools (which would never happen). It would be far smarter for the big educational publishers to buy this thing back for mega-bucks rather than launch a lawsuit they could lose.

ryanhuff2• 14 years ago

Why would the publishers buy a third party service when they already have a captive audience of customers (teachers)?

timwiseman• 14 years ago

Additionally, suing a site designed to help teachers and run by a former teacher might generate some rather bad publicity.

ktsmith7• 14 years ago

The teaching exception does not include copying, only performance and display, copying and distribution is what's happening here. The plans I've looked at contained fonts/images that have specific licenses forbidding commercial redistribution/resale and they are distributed as part of purchased plans. The author of the plan includes links to where the fonts/images can be purchased but still distributed them in a commercial form. The DMCA safe harbor would be the only thing I think that would protect them, but that hasn't stopped suits in the past.

bradleyland3• 14 years ago

I'm afraid that's not how it works at all. TPT is selling these materials to other teachers. They are, in effect, a publisher.

The teaching exception means that a teacher in a classroom can show a copyrighted piece as part of her lesson plan. It does not mean that you can "package" a lesson plan that includes the same materials, then sell them to other teachers.

If it were possible to use the teaching exception in this way, all educational book publishers could use any image they want without paying for it. I've worked with a children's educational book publisher for the last 10 years. They have to buy all copyrighted materials used in their books.

A caveat. I've never seen a TPT lesson plan, so maybe I'm unclear on how they "package". Specifically, I use the term package to mean that the actual copyrighted materials are included with the file you receive. TPT could get around the copyright issue by inserting reference placeholders, then instruct the purchaser to acquire the images on their own, but that's a significant amount of work. I would be surprised if that's how they were packaged.

ktsmith7• 14 years ago

> It would be far smarter for the big educational publishers to buy this thing back for mega-bucks rather than launch a lawsuit they could lose.

The linked article points out that Scholastic bought the site from it's creator and then sold it back when it didn't become an overnight viral success.

akldfgj• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3989803

"Kindergarten Teacher Earns $700,000 by Selling Lesson Plans Online"

May 2012

baseh• 14 years ago

Not sure of the outcome, ( Marenem vs Jump was behind paywalls) but a company seemed to have sued.

http://www.macon.com/2012/06/12/2056692/north-carolina-compa...

DrStalker• 14 years ago

What stops lesson planning being done at a higher level than per-teacher? That's obviously how it is happens now making TPT a great resource but why are schools/states/federal bodies not providing the lesson plans that are needed instead of making each teacher do something unique?

jetti• 14 years ago

Some schools/districts do that. It turns out though, that many teachers want to control their own classroom and do their own plan. One of the gripes my fiance had while student teaching and then subbing was that she wasn't in control of her lesson planning. One of the issues with the Chicago Public School strike was that the teachers weren't able to create their own lesson plans.

Standardizing the lesson plan eliminates (or greatly reduces) the ability for the teacher to be creative in their classroom and teaching. On top of that, a standardized lesson plan would also be hard to work around in case there were areas that took the students longer than expected.

marcamillion2• 14 years ago

This seems like something that Patio11 could have (or still can) capitalize on.

It seems a natural progression from generating Bingo Cards, to branching out to lesson plans to facilitating the sale of user-generated lesson plans.

patio11• 14 years ago

It might have worked. There's a few reasons why BCC works. The fact that I "get" teachers is one of them, but that's far from the most lucrative skill I developed. Having a list of ~50k teachers for a newsletter would help sell activities but, honestly, I think I'm sort of done with that market until I have school-aged kids.

marcamillion2• 14 years ago

Well....always something to keep in your back pocket. You never know when you can come up with a way to leverage that list powerfully.

How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans

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