Filed Under: Training Materials
The recently released Blog Post on Training Materials provided the following, extremely helpful clarification:
- “If a school’s current training materials are copyrighted or otherwise protected as proprietary business information (for example, by an outside consultant), the school still must comply with the Title IX Rule. This may mean that the school has to secure permission from the copyright holder to publish the training materials on the school’s website.
- Nothing in the Title IX Rule abrogates intellectual property rights. If a school is unable to secure permission from a third party to post copyrighted training materials, then the school must create or obtain training materials that can lawfully be posted on the school’s website.”
However, I wanted to ensure that I am advising my staff moving forward and have two brief clarifying questions:
- After 8/14/20, in order to use a third-party training entity, must the Recipient secure permission to post the materials publicly in order to use that training?
- If a third party is unwilling to grant permission to have their materials displayed publicly, may those materials be used as supplemental materials to the training materials created or obtained that are lawfully posted that sufficiently cover the topics in required in Section 106?
The new Title IX Rule does not, by its own terms, require a recipient to “secure permission to post” its Title IX training materials; the Rule, in broad terms, does require recipients to post “all materials” used to train that recipient’s Title IX personnel on the recipient’s website.
Nothing in the Title IX Rule abrogates intellectual property rights. Thus, if a recipient is unable to secure permission to lawfully post third-party, proprietary training materials, the recipient will need to create or use materials that the recipient can lawfully post on the recipient’s website. If materials are used to train a recipient’s Title IX personnel—even if those materials contain elements that “supplement” Title IX regulatory requirements—such materials are part of “all materials” that must be posted on the recipient’s website under § 106.45(b)(10).
For further information on this topic, please review this blog post published by OCR.