Co-op Licensing: Sharing Purchased Materials Legally

Quick answer: A TeachLessons purchase is a single-teacher license. One teacher, unlimited classes of her own students, reused every year, printed as often as she needs. A co-op where several families teach from one purchased file falls outside that. The clean fix is that each teaching adult buys her own copy.

What does the license you already bought actually cover?

Plain terms, no lawyer voice:

• One teacher. The person who bought it is the person licensed to teach from it.
• Unlimited students of her own. Four children at your kitchen table or a class of thirty — the license does not count heads.
• Unlimited printing for those students. Print the worksheets again next term, print them again when the dog eats one.
• Every year, forever. No renewal, no expiry. Buy it once for your eldest and use it again for your youngest six years later.
• Digital delivery to your own students. Posting the files inside a closed classroom or class group your students access is fine.

What it does not cover is another adult teaching from your file. That is not a technicality about seat counts. It is the line between one license and two.

Where does a co-op cross the line?

The distinction is who is teaching, not who is learning. One teacher with forty students is inside the license. Four teachers with ten students each is four licenses.

So what is the clean answer for a co-op?

One purchase per teaching adult. If three parents each lead a section of the same course, that is three purchases. It is not the answer anyone wants to read, but it is the honest one, and it is what the license says.

There is no co-op tier here, and it would be easy to invent one to make this paragraph friendlier. There is not one, so plan around what exists. Two practical ways families handle it:

• Split by unit, not by copy. Each parent buys the units she personally teaches. Across a year with rotating leaders, the total spend is often lower than everyone buying everything.
• Put it in the co-op fee. If the group charges per family, add the materials cost for the teaching parents into the budget rather than asking one person to absorb it.

If your group needs several copies at once, write and ask before you assume anything about pricing. An email costs nothing and gets you a straight answer.

What about the student copies?

Printing worksheets for every student in the class you teach is exactly what the license is for, and it does not matter that those students belong to other families. Sending the source file home to parents is different, because a parent with the file can teach from it, and now you are back to the teacher question.

Why sellers care, in one paragraph

A file shared eight ways is eight sales that did not happen, and small stores live and die on that arithmetic. The reason this store can price single units at five to twenty-five dollars instead of packaging everything as an institutional site license is that most buyers stay inside the license. That is worth saying out loud rather than lecturing about copyright law.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use one purchase for all my own children?

Yes. All of them, for as many years as you need, including children not yet born when you bought it.

Can I resell or pass on files when I finish homeschooling?

No. Digital licenses are not transferable, the way a used textbook is.

Can I post student work made from the worksheets online?

Yes. Photographs of finished student work are yours. Do not post scans of the blank worksheets themselves.

What if I already shared a file before reading this?

Ask the others to buy their own copies and delete what you sent. Nobody is coming after you; the point is to fix it going forward.

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