Copyright
About Reselling BIP Products
First, we’re glad to hear that you care to check our resale policies! That already speaks highly of you that you would seek out the rules of resale instead of just doing it.
Any physical book (paperback or hardback) or physical CD may be re-sold. Feel free to do so! If you copied any files from a CD to your computer, you must delete those files before selling the CD. Also, if your CD came bound in your book (such as in North Star Geography or The Mystery of History Volume IV), they must be kept or sold together; they may NOT be sold separately.
However, downloaded products for which you do not have a CD may NOT be resold. When purchasing a downloadable product, you are actually purchasing a license to use the product, not the product itself, and that license is not transferable.
About Co-Op Usage
Most of our products are intended and licensed for single family use only, however we do offer co-op discounts and licenses. Click here to learn more about them or call our office for details.
About User-Generated Content
As a company, we love the fact that so many homeschool families enjoy our products so much that they want to add their own creativity and share it with others! Many of you have graciously asked us how to make sure you don’t inadvertently violate copyright laws, so let me share four easy ground rules. I’ll be using The Mystery of History as my example, but it applies to anything we publish.
These rules are more lenient than copyright law—they’re not a summary of copyright law. They’re our way of granting you license to create user-generated content so you don’t have to worry whether what you’re doing is legal or not. Please note that these rules do not apply to any other company—we can’t grant license for user-generated content on other people’s material. You’ll need to check with them first!
Sharing FREE Materials
1) Keep the price free. If it’s a derivative work that relies on The Mystery of History (MOH) or any of our other titles, you can’t charge for it. That’s a trademark violation.
– Example 1: If you make a set of timeline figures that works perfectly with MOH and follows the rest of the ground rules, you can post it online, but you may not charge for it.
2) Keep the author/publisher clear. Please don’t claim that Bright Ideas Press or any of our authors wrote, sanctioned, or licensed something you made on your own. Using the BIP or MOH logo or using The Mystery of History in the title of your material isn’t OK. Unless we’ve licensed it, that’s a trademark violation.
– Example 2: If you make a set of timeline figures, it’s fine for you to call it Ancient History Timeline Figures, but not okay to call it The Mystery of History Volume I Timeline Figures.
3) Keep it non-duplicative. If your printables are substantially similar to our book, notebooking pages, challenge cards, folderbooks, coloring pages, cookbooks, or other supplemental products, then you may not distribute your own version. You’re welcome to make your own for your family’s use or your co-op’s use, but don’t post them online. That’s a copyright violation.
– Example 3: If you make a set of activity pages with questions and answers about each lesson of MOH, those are substantially similar to our notebooking pages—even if the questions are different. You could use them at home, but you couldn’t share them online.
– Example 4: If you make MOH quizzes on an online flash card or quizzing service, that would be substantially similar to both our in-book tests and our challenge cards. Using that online service for your own kids or co-op is OK, but sharing those cards or quizzes with others is not.
– Example 5: If you make a brand-new printable that doesn’t duplicate the format of BIP products but quotes extensively from the text, that is still a copyright violation. A sentence here or there is fine. But frequent or lengthy quotations, reproducing activity directions, or listing all the dates from the table of contents is a copyright violation.
– Example 6: If you make a schedule for MOH showing how your family laid it out for year-round schooling, or perhaps showing how it correlates with other history curriculum, that is OK to give away, as it does not duplicate anything else that we sell. You can safely reference page numbers, activity numbers, lesson titles, etc.
Selling Materials
Keep it generic. While derivative works are a trademark violation, there’s plenty of room in the marketplace for non-derivative folderbooks or printables. If you’re not making references to MOH (including page numbers, activity numbers, or lesson titles), you can sell whatever you want—that’s fine. It helps if you include material not found in MOH—if you’re using our table of contents as your table of contents, that’s still a copyright violation. But adding original material goes a long way. You can even still say “This works really well with The Mystery of History” if you want. That’s OK, too. But make it your own product, not an MOH knockoff.
We hope that clarifies copyright boundaries. We love your creativity and enthusiasm, and we want to see it flourish in the online community we share! We only bring it up because when people violate our copyright, it hurts our sales, which means the authors’ and employees’ families have to resort to cold ramen noodles for dinner, and nobody wants that. We’re not some big, greedy corporation; we are a small, family-run business, and we have mouths to feed and babies on the way. Helping us to stay in business helps not just our authors and us, but it also helps the homeschooling community who appreciate our dedication to sharing the Gospel through well-written and researched products. Thanks for understanding.
If you still have questions, feel free to contact us at Contact@BrightIdeasPress.com. We’re happy to look over what you’ve done before you post it and let you know if it meets these criteria. When in doubt, just ask!