How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.