You have a case you have taught for years. You have bought the student copies properly every term. Now there is software that will turn it into something your students can step inside and play — and the upload button is right there.
Pause on that button. Distributing a case and transforming one are not the same act, and most licences only clearly permit the first.
What a teaching licence usually gives you
Case licensing varies by publisher, and you must read your own. But the common shape is a per-copy, per-cohort right to distribute: you buy a number of student copies, you give them to that class, for that course, that term. It is a right to put the document in front of people.
What it typically does not mention at all is what happens when you take that document and produce something new from it — because when most of these licences were written, nobody could.
Why a simulation is a different act
Turning a case into an interactive experience usually involves several distinct things, and they carry different risk:
Uploading it to a third party
Your licence permits distribution to students. A platform is not a student. Ask where the file goes, who can read it, and whether it is used to train anything. A platform that cannot answer that quickly is telling you something.
Creating a derivative work
A simulation built from a case is, in copyright terms, plainly derived from it. Characters, facts, exhibits and the situation all come from the original. That is the part a distribution licence is least likely to cover.
Republishing it
This is the line that actually matters. Sharing a playable link with your own thirty students is recognisably teaching. Putting that link somewhere anyone can reach it is publishing — and it is the thing that will get a letter from a publisher, quite reasonably.
A useful rule of thumb. A licence to teach is not a licence to republish. If the output of the tool can be reached by someone who was never entitled to the original, you have crossed from one to the other — regardless of how the software was marketed to you.
What to actually do
- Read the licence you already have. Some explicitly address adaptation and digital derivatives. Some are silent, which is not the same as permission.
- Just ask the publisher. This is the step people skip, and it is by far the most effective one. Publishers are actively working out their position on exactly this, and a named academic asking about a specific case for a specific cohort tends to get a real answer.
- Ask who wrote it. If a colleague at your institution wrote the case, the conversation is short and internal.
- Start with material you own outright. Your own teaching notes, an internal scenario, a client situation you have written up yourself, or a case you wrote. No permission needed, and it is the fastest way to find out whether the format suits your teaching at all.
- Keep the output inside the cohort. Access-controlled, time-bound, tied to the group who hold the original licence.
What to ask a platform
Whichever tool you use, these four questions are worth putting in an email:
- Where is my uploaded case stored, and who can access it?
- Is anything I upload used to train models, or to build content for other customers?
- Can the experience I create be reached by anyone outside my class, and what stops that?
- Who is responsible if a publisher objects — and does your contract quietly make that me?
On that last one: most terms in this category place the rights warranty on you, the uploader. That is not unreasonable — you are the one who knows what you are licensed for — but you should know it is there rather than discover it later.
Where we stand
CaseConduit is a tool, not a publisher. We do not host a library of other people's cases, and we do not want to be in the business of licensing content we did not write. What you upload stays yours, stays in your account, and is not used to train anything or to build anyone else's material.
We ask you to confirm you have the right to use material when you upload it, and we say plainly in our terms that a licence to teach is not a licence to republish. That is a deliberately conservative position, and it is the one that keeps a careful academic out of trouble.
This is not legal advice, and case licences differ meaningfully between publishers and between individual cases. If real money or a real cohort depends on the answer, ask the publisher and your institution's library or legal team — both would rather field the question early than deal with it afterwards.
Try it on something you already own
The quickest way to find out whether an interactive case suits your teaching is to build one from material with no rights questions attached. Or play a complete worked case first — free, no upload, nothing to license.
Play the worked case →