Using Textbooks and Curricula in a Web Application

[goodh2]

I am in the process of developing a commercial web application that has as a main feature practice calculus problems. I need these practice problems to cover the entire spectrum of possible calculus concepts, and so I need a list of all of the concepts covered in calculus courses. My question is, may I refer to copyrighted textbooks, university calculus course schedules, university curriculum, etc. to create a list of calculus topics? Is referring to the organization of calculus concepts in these copyrighted materials a violation of copyright?

[brownj12]

You are going to have to be more specific about what you are looking to take from these texts, If you are truly only using them as a reference for which topics to cover, i.e. Integration, Derivatives, Riemann Sums, Implicit Differentiation, etc then you are fine, you are welcome to reference published topics to gain more information on the topic to use in developing your web app. You cannot take their examples and use them as your own without permission. If these books had a novel concept (unlikely) of how to teach the topic you may also run into issues using those. However simply doing research to discover the common topics covered in a calculus course is perfectly legal.

[goodh2]

Thank you, you added some great clarification for me.

[budwad]

If not for footnotes and references, Wikipedia would be out of business.