Dr Natalie Corthésy, a lecturer at The University of the West Indies, Mona, who heads of the law faculty's intellectual property stream, is of the view that one challenge that could arise is the “ownership of employee works, where teachers are asked to deliver online classes, where to do so requires them to create content”.

“And so COVID-19 has really put teachers in a position where it might be that they are going beyond what their employment contract has asked them to do by creating these new copyright works to fulfil an online teaching requirement, which, I think, for many teachers, this would not have been the case — especially at the primary level where I feel the education system is really struggling to grapple with what has happened with the cancellation of the Primary Exit Profile exams,” Dr Corthésy noted.

“Further, teachers are required to have their classes recorded, and this qualifies as a public performance, certainly under our Copyright Act, and a public performance where, pursuant to an agreement... an employee would then have copyright in that work and it wouldn't necessarily vest with the employer.

Lots of memes have also come on, short videos, photographs, just a plethora of copyright works where persons have been trying to, I guess, relieve themselves of the stress of COVID-19, and one can easily imagine how this could be problematic if authorship became an issue and if there was a desire to try and exploit those works beyond the COVID-19 experience,” Dr Corthésy pointed out.

There's a new so-called 'Making Available' right that Jamaica has incorporated in its 2015 Copyright Act — and this we had to do because of our signing on to the World Intellectual Property Organisation's Internet Treaties — and this communication to the public, including making it available through hyperlinking, peer to peer, so that the public can access the works at another time of their own choosing, becomes a real problem.

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