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CA Legislature Passes Ban On Sale Of Lecture Notes
Interestingly, part of the explanatory text of the bill points out that "[e]xisting case law provides that in the absence of evidence of agreement to the contrary, a teacher, rather than the institution for which he or she teaches, owns the common law copyright to his or her lectures." That does seem to make some sense, but are notes "the lecture"? If I draw a sketch of a painting, does the original artist own my sketch, too? (Or in this case, does the University of California?)
If "commericial" distribution is prohibited, what about non-commericial? If this spreads to Texas, I know a few businesses on Austin's Drag that would have to quickly rethink their operations. Absent rigorous NDAs, is it fair to restrict the information in a lecture? A video or audio recording is one thing, but notes are by their nature different from the original lecture. Sharing lecture notes is not akin to "sharing" term papers or stealing tests. Wouldn't this be akin to declaring that a reader is not allowed to summarize the content of a book he borrows from the library, or purchases outright?
Gnutella Gnotes, anyone?
Are they trying to say that people who put lecture notes on the web are against babies? People who like babies won't put lecture notes on the web?
What the fuck! We're paying $30,000 a year for this, you damn right we're gonna do what we want with it. Fair friggin use!
Quick, someone say something intelligent? My guess is, all the people who whine about it who are from California didn't bother to let their legislators know their feelings?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
I would think that there is going to be a hell of a protest about this.
Notes taken during a class are basically just the note-taker's paraphrase of what's said. It isn't copyrighted material! Since when isn't someone allowed to write about something, and sell their work (if they desire)?
I mean, a ruling that basically says "I'm special.. what I say in front of this group of people, within these 4 walls, belongs to me and no one else. Bwahahahaha)
What about if a fellow student is absent, can notes be shared with them? What if they need to pay for the paper that the copy of the notes is written on, does that violate the ruling?
*sigh*
I can see it now. By the same "logic" applied in this bill, the next time a politician lies, calls someone an a**hole, etc at a press conference, they can just say "Sorry, I own the copyright to that quote and you can't reproduce it without my express written permission"
Isn't the whole point of universities to share knowledge anyway?
And just who do those stupid regents of the UC system think is footing the bill for all those classes anyway? It sure isn't them.
Right. And doesn't it also, logically, prohibit you from using your learned information in a commercial way? What about if I learn how to code linked lists in class, and then tell a coworker how to do that at my internship? Oops!
Of course, this is meant to prohibit those places that sell lecture notes back to students, a ban which I'd more or less agree with. But it doesn't seem written in quite the right way.
Free speech issues aside, does any student actually buy these notes? I never have, but then again, I've never really skipped more than a couple classes per semester. Evidently there's a market for these, since you see those shops everywhere, but I don't know a single person who's actually bought notes.
Most of the lecture-type classes I've taken a service like this would be completely useless since they normally put a copy of their notes in the library after class anyway. As a matter of fact, that would be a good way of combating this... just have the prof dump his notes in the library and make them available to students at the cost of copying... whether it's done by hand or for 5c a page from the copier. Just eliminate the market for them and you eliminate the problem.
Thi smakes sense in a twisted sort of way (thats not to say that I agree with it; but I am not a copyright supporter anyway)
The lecure itself is copyright the teacher. The notes however are written by the student. However, the notes are derived from the original work (the lecture).
So thus, as a derivitive work, the original author would still have copyright. This would be like distributing your own "Garfeild" cartoons. The artist who made garfeild has copyright on the character...so unless you are making a parody (which would be fair use), or using it to teach a class (again fair use),distributing it is copyright infringement.
Of course, this assumes that no substantial value was added by the student. That would complicate things.
Of course IANAL; but I have read the FAQs and other stuff at the Copyright office website. They go into some (but not much) detail on these subjects.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Is it true that theoretically I could drive a boat out the international waters and broadcast this stuff? "See that boat there. They're broadcasting Standford law lectures with implied oral consent not expressed written consent... or so the legend goes."
I don't know about you, but it doesn't make me happy to know that my doctors may have gotten into med school based on their ability to take a test prep course rather than their normal abilities. (yes I know that standardized tests aren't true measurements of knowledge etc. but it is the way it is).
To me, that is a lot worse than using lecture notes. I bet more people could honestly say they use lecture notes in addition to class or to find out about a class than people who could honestly say they use Napster only for non-copyrighted works and isn't "fair use" what it is all about?
After all students are paying for those lectures in the first place.
Tony
Actually I think this is fair. They're talking about *commercial* resources. If you a) aren't going to class b) don't make friends that might give you some notes c) want some sort of advantage over other students... etc... then maybe you shouldn't go. Sorry.
----
I'm no lawyer... but does this make sense:
.sigs??
I pay my tuition to pay for my prof's salary, and he gives me the service of his lectures. That kinda makes him my 'employee' (in a very general sense). Don't I have a right to everything he said? I did help pay for his salary when he lectured, right?
Is this a valid? Like I said before, I'm no lawyer... far from one...
-- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I was there "before" the web, so I haven't looked to see if the note taking services have websites yet. Studying for an exam at 3am it sure would be tempting to enter a credit card number at website and get the notes for that day I had dozed off...
I don't really see what the problem selling lecture notes is, being firmly .edu I think attribution is very important, and the notes obviously retain attribution. What use would lecture notes be if the course and professor weren't listed?
This seems to be the relevent passage:
CHAPTER 6.5. UNAUTHORIZED RECORDING, DISSEMINATION, AND
PUBLICATION OF ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES
66450. (a) Except as authorized by policies developed in
accordance with subdivision (a) of Section 66452, no business,
agency, or person, including, but not necessarily limited to, an
enrolled student, shall prepare, cause to be prepared, give, sell,
transfer, or otherwise distribute or publish, for any commercial
purpose, any contemporaneous recording of an academic presentation in
a classroom or equivalent site of instruction by an instructor of
record. This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium,
including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten
class notes.
It never mentions that a non-commercial entity cannot distribute said materials; it specifically mentions "commercial purpose" as part of the restriction. A lawyer, of course, is free to correct my interpretation.
Another point to defend this is the fact that it mentions "contemporaneous recording" in which it means, IIRC, any recording made at the time of the lecture/presentation.
So distributing handwritten notes(not teacher's notes!) should be okay(except perhaps for the fact that your own copyright is being violated when someone else is distributing your notes), unless that counts as a "contemporaneous recording", though it is lossy, full of interpretation, and not authored at all by the professor/lecturer.
Another point is that the information handed out was not under NDA, for the most part, so any notes one has taken, under free speech and other statutes, is fair game for distribution. They are distributing their own works, and not that of the institution, lecturer, or professor.
IANAL!
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
The problem I see with this bill is as follows:
.ps), but there are many disciplines (Bio, English) that don't. This bill could effectively take away a students right to that lecture material.
It would seem to me that a student enrolled in a course has a right to the information contained in the lecture.
If a student misses a lecture, he/she must be able to get access to the lectures content by *some* means - a friends notes, a note-taking service, an audio-recording, or professor supplied notes.
Friends are unreliable. Audio-recordings usually require friends. It would seem to me then, that if commercial ventures are outlawed, then the professor or institution should have to provide the content (post lecture).
Most of my professors (actually, I can't even think of any exceptions) provided notes (god pless
Perhaps the bill should be re-worded in such a way that the onus is on the student or note-service not to buy/sell material for a presentation he was not originally allowed to attend?
If I pay to attend a speaking engagment, listen to the the speaker (let's say it's the presidential candidates for arguments sake), then afterwards write about their talk for my job (oh yeah, pretend I work for a newspaper), isn't that the same thing?
Pay to get in, summarize what they say, write it up, sell it...
When I attended my freshman orientation in 1986 at Michigan State University, one of the speakers specifically said that we needed to get permission from the professor before any tape recording was done in the classroom. The reason was that the professor owned the copyright to the actual lecture. On the other hand, he said that written notes, provided they were not a verbatim transcript of the lecture, were our property and we did not need to get permission to take or share our notes.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
If my friend and I are in a class, and she takes much better notes than I, would it then be illegal for me to pay her (her to accept money) to take notes for me?
Would she be a note-prostitute?
I have just copyrighted any and all coments made by user: "annonomous coward" no portion of these coments may be read, discussed, glanced at or reproduced without my express permision. Furthermore these coments may not be moderated down without a written letter of intent by the moderator involved. failure to folow these rules will result in shaving your cat.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
This isn't something that legislature can easily decide... I'm in college, and I believe that I should be able to sell notes that I take in lecture. There are some problems that do have to be considered though, like how this impacts things like grades and participation. I wouldn't sell notes for the purposes of giving a elite few with money a chance to get grades that they don't deserve, but I don't know how lecture notes without the lecture would really help even. What if the consequences of letting students sell notes is to cause a general increase of the level of education of the populace, because the people buying the lecture notes probably wouldn't have learned except by what the are learning by reading the notes of someone who is probably a lot more intelligent and observant? I would like to see figures on how the committees researched the need and consequences of the law, becuase there are potential side-effects that they might not have even considered.
Some of my professors didn't want notes and other information being exchanged between students or students and outside parties, and if they caught a student doing such a penalty could be expulsion from the class. Some teachers, however, encouraged it. I have a professor right now who actually asked if anyone wanted to take notes for $75, because there was a student that was not going to be around to take them herself. I don't see this being a bad thing, but if it's not permitted, then students who need such help may not be able to get it. I don't think that legal statutes will help the matter at all.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I really don't understand why professors would dislike this. Someone is providing their class with study aids and they don't have to lift a finger.
As far as copyright infringement goes, I think that's a litle silly too. The only financial benefit received is from tuition. Are students going to stop drop out of university and buy the notes online instead? The whole point of lecture notes and education is to spread the information. What does the medium matter?
Ideally, "perfect" testing would discourage students from skipping class. If the class is really providing a benefit, then the results should be reflected in the tests. If students can do just as well on the tests without the class, then either the test is flawed, or the class is not worthwhile.
Unless the notes specifically amount to a transcript or outline of the lecture (some students admittedly do take notes this way), the school ought to be able to claim no rights over the notes.
It's certainly sick when the ideas (which are generally speaking public domain) expressed in the lecture themselves are considered the intellectual property of the school, just because that's where you happened to get them from.
Of course, I suppose there is precedent for this treatment of public domain content -- companies who sell access to databases have been lobbying for IP "protection" for public domain content extracted from their databases for a long time.
Let's say I become a teacher... is my alma mater going to start demanding royalties?
DNA just wants to be free...
This does not prohibit me from puttin any notes I take up on the web for free. If you buy the notes because you're not going to class, chances are you'll be out of the school pretty fast. If you are buying notes because you prefer not to take any, then that is fine. You should be able to find friends to share notes with you if you go to class, though.
This just proves what a sham organized education is. The whole intent to educating people is so that they will be more knowledgeable. It doesn't matter if people go to class or not as long as they know the material. How can institutes be upset at students learning? That's the bottom line: it doesn't matter *how* the students learn. I find it ironic though that with the internet booming there are universities who not only don't take advantage of it for teaching, but rather censor it's use. Does anyone else find that backwards?
Well isn't using the knowledge at the job i get after i graduate using the material for financial gain?
Don't these people get it? The more you ban something the more people desire it. I forsee elaborate warez channels funneling this stuff around universities, etc. Why is it they figure banning something will stop it?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
But what if you actually sold your notes? Suppose you taped all the episodes of the Simpsons and duplicated them thousands of times, and sold them at a hefty profit. Is that right? The value of the tapes isn't the effort you made in duplicating them, it is in the contents. You are making a profit off of someone else's work. Similarly, if you photocopy your notes and sell them to people, the value of your notes is not in the effort you made in copying the contents of the blackboard. It is in the content of the notes.
I don't know about the legal issues, but the moral issues are pretty clear. Making a profit off of someone else's work without giving the creator any recompense is wrong. Helping out your friends is right. I know that if my students took good notes in my classes and then put them on the internet for anyone to download I'd be thrilled. If my students made money off of my lectures, or some company made money by selling the notes, I'd be pissed.
Whas the big deal anyway. In order to get credit for a class you have to pay for it. Who cares if I actually go to the lectures?
--tim
Further more, in a perfect world, W. wouldn't loose customers due to rival drug dealers. But this is reality, so we appreciate CIA support to get rid of them.
The Meaning of Life
great comedy company.
Similar to someone working for a company, and the company claiming rights to their work, students should claim rights to the information they pay for.
Although they can NOT claim ownership of the information, they can claim joint ownership of that particular presentation.
However I can not see how they can lose ownership of related property they create.
That would be akin to presenting an idea at work, then when your employeer comes up with a product based on that idea, claiming ownership of it too.
Intellectual property is a slippery subject, indeed. But my father was an English professor for forty years. His lectures were his constructions, built out of his own observations and the lectures of those before him. And, he always cited respectfully. If students would treat the material with respect and cite properly all this legal hoorah would not be necessary. "Settle your differences before you get to court. For, if you go to court, neither of you will get what you want." (From some old book I read once.)
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
I wonder how well some of these lecture notes correlate to the text book. Heck, I had a few profs who almost read from the book. (This was the minority, however.)
If you can redistribute your notes, does this mean that lecturers that attend lectures cannot come back and teach what they have learned? They are after all getting paid for teaching, making it commercial.
t
Two quarters ago, I was paid by the University of California to take notes for another student, who had a disability. It seems to me that this would violate that new law. So maybe UC would be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities act?
Two is not equal to three, not even for very large values of two.
If bans on distributing lecture notes were around in ancient Greek times, we probably wouldn't have any of the works that we refer to as being "by Aristotle". Well...ok, I don't know that those were commercially distributed...
Look at it this way: what if I wrote up an article about a speech made by a politician at a closed setting? Would that be infringing on copyright? What's the difference?
-- dR.fuZZo
I didn't skip very many classes either. But I rarely took comprehensive notes. I got a lot more out of classes by paying more attention to the gist of the lecture than diverting my attention into writing down highlights.
I enjoyed the lectures more and I learned more. Perhaps I could have scored higher on tests by ferretting out lecture highlights and paying more dogmatic attention. But I chose to enjoy learning as well as try to assimilate the knowledge into my personality rather than just fair well academically.
Back in high school, when studying for a test, I found it very useful to read through a classmate's notes in addition to my own. Reading someone else's perspective on the lecture often gave me insight into what the teacher was saying that I wouldn't have gotten from my perspective alone.
So I don't think that the answer is in restricting the dissemination of lecture notes.
I think the best solution is to have the university itself sell and profit from the lecture notes. Maybe tuition could be lowered a little.
my livejournal is interesting and worth reading - I swear. I know everyone thinks their blog is interesting. mine is.
..it prohibits a lecturer from making a commercial enterprises based on his own lectures. It also throws into disarray the idea of making programs for broadcast on any station that isn't explicitly not-for-profit.
There isn't even a fair-use or reporting provision.
This seems to allow for any sort of notes which condense the content of the class in terms of the field without actually being directly from the instructor.
For example, if the instructor covers the war of 1812 with a heavy emphasis on linear equations, you could easily distribute a booklet that described all of the relavent points from the war, and linear equations with time-key indexes to indicate which secations would have been covered on which days.
If the teacher had a slant on the topic (e.g. felt that such equations were NOT the key to victory, as previosly thought, but were in fact tangential to success), you could point out that that point of view is held by some professors, and call out the particular course as an example.
This sort of second-hand analysis is certainly not covered by the law, and is legal in every other aspect of business that I'm aware of.
If, on the other hand, the goal of the law is to prevent people from passing tests after skipping class then a) it's a bad law and b) it will never work, no matter how you word it. These are college kids we're talking about. They're the single largest concentration of creative energy on the planet, and if you try to stop them, you will lose. Luckily for the powers that be, they can be easily distracted with shiny things....
Lawyers: thoughts?
The student enrolled has a right to that information?
I dunno, maybe I'm seeing it differently. Isn't it a priviledge that the student has access to the information?
I would think that millions of students miss classes, and somehow still get notes, from the TAs, the profs, their friends, etc. This bill makes sense in that it explicitly states that the lecturer/prof has the rights to their work, and that without his or her consent, no one can use their work commercially. This is about the presentation and lecture, and any recordings of them, and not specifically about notes taken during class. I imagine those are fair game, and the rights are assigned to the note-taker, and not the prof, at that point.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Any class that had lecture notes when I was in college was one of those 450 student monsters where the prof just recited what you would have learned had you read the required reading anyhow. By banning lecture notes, you keep students from discovering just how useless the lectures (and often the classes themselves) are...
Ok, so this law is intended to ensure that professors retain control over their teaching materials--it's not transferring copyright to the Board of Regents as suggested. Specifically, the law says-
That said, it still looks like a bad law, rooted--once again--in the silly notion that ideas are a scarce resource. This one is a little more obviously bad than most, but only because the material it is protecting is more obviously intended for sharing. I mean, come on, it's a school--are we really supposed to believe that students shouldn't apply the ideas encountered to other parts of their lives? Or maybe we should think that students shouldn't use what they learn at school to make money?
This won't go away until people are making more money from sharing ideas than they do from hoarding them. When that happens, the balance of political power will shift away from the copyright holders and to the information consumers--right where it should be today. There are several ways this could happen; the open source movement is the best example so far although there are signs of similar trends in other industries.
daniel
All I needed to know in life I learned from
What I want to know is, why? What the hell difference does it make? Are they just pissed because someone is making a profit off of their work? Why don't they sell them then? It isn't like you can buy all the notes and then buy a Stanford degree, you still have to pay the tuitiona and get the grades.
So if I delay making the notes until after class, are those free for distribution? How many times do I have to rewrite them before they are mine and only mine?
Casca
I honestly don't understand the problem here.
I personally would never post lectures notes that I had taken during a class on the web. That really is akin to the substance of the lecture. It is no different than rewording a textbook or paper and publishing it. Without permission from the author, it is clearly illegal. If credit is not given to the author, it is extremely unethical.
If however I understand the material and form my own treatment of the subject, that of course is my own work.
The lecture itself is clearly copyrightable, just as a play or dramatic presentation is. The ideas themselves, and the equations in particular, are not copyrightable. But the presentation of the material is a creative work, and is just as deserving of protection as a textbook.
So maybe the law is poorly written - since it is not specifically cited, I cannot judge that. Perhaps the idea of copyright itself is flawed; but that is a separate matter. It is indisputable that attending a lecture, and then distributing the content as if it were your own work, is inexcusable.
You must credit the originator. That much is basic ethics. If you don't already agree with that principle, there is probably no way to convince you of it.
(1) The notes serve a purpose for two ends of the spectrum: the very dedicated and the slacker. The very dedicated bought and reviewed the notes to use in addition to their own. The slackers, well, never went to class so used the notes to stay on the pace.
(2) The notes themselves vary in quality, dramatically, from notetaker to notetaker, and service to service. Some are nearly transcripts, some are outlines, some are interpretive.... usually all are helpful!
Issues? Why should they be [legal/illegal]? Well, like everything else, it's gray, not black and white.
Certainly, a class with notes available from the service had more attendance problems ("why go to class? I'll just buy the notes."). Worse than just bummin' 'em from friends? Probably not, but the commercial availability was certainly an oversleeping-enabler.
The professors put a lot of time into their materials... what right does any service have to make (mucho!) bucks off that work? Composing a *good* lecture is not easy... especially 2-3 times / week for months! But... if the professors don't care about attendance and/or can see the argument that the notes help the students learn the material (the important part, right?), then there's reason to allow the service.
BUT... the University (and in many cases, the Government) pay for the time to develop and deliver those lectures (entirely private schools, with no federal funding (are there even any of those?) can skip this point). The Government (read: the _taxpayers_) pay for that information - why should some company get to make (mucho!) bucks off of it?
In every case, for our service, we received professor approval *first* -- no approval, no notes. I don't know if it works that way everywhere, but I certainly hope so.
So, point? Well... seems like something that shouldn't be decided on a legislature level (except in that the legislature represents the people who paid for the IP getting resold!). Should be professor / school decision. However, I do think that some of the profits of the services should be returned to the departments for their own use (probably not directly to the professors since, again, the school paid for the development of the lectures).
Anyway... just a few thoughts to fuel the fires.
As a Grad student of UCDavis, we were all told that the lecture notes of any class were written by us, but the University holds the ownership. Pretty much anything that you do (at least good things) are bound by this. When you sign the paper that says you are going to the school, that is part of the deal that you are signing. Most folks are unaware of this, but some people follow it.
Now originally, I thought it was a huge scam. But, while I still think that my thoughts are not (copyright, UCDavis) there is some good to be had here. The major one is that I will not get sued for having a wrong idea that is later proven wrong or someone else uses and it turns out to have terrible consequences. The Earth is still flat, right?
So as far as this goes, it was sort of always this way. Also I have noticed that note taking services are not persecuted here, but I believe that they are also not the note takers property. As far as people taking notes in class, I encourage it, even if they buy them later from someone else. If you have TA'd in your lifetime, you would know the horrible feeling of 25 blank stares. My $0.02 (I think I'll GPL that, crap it is probably UCD's property)
R
So? Sounds like Prof. Deflem needs to peek his head out of academia for a second and think about another, more important principal - free speech.
As others have noted, it would (possibly) be a different story if we were talking about audio/video recordings, but these are notes!!
Two things disturb me about this situation. First, it's a fairly classic 'slippery-slope' problem. How long will it be until non-commercial distribution of class notes are prohibited? See RMS's 'Right to Read' story for a worst-case scenario.
Second, legislation that passes in CA is often adopted throughout much of the rest of the country. Clearly, that would be a mistake with this one.
The bill is so clearly unconstitutional, I wonder that it got sponsered in the first place.
Oh... IANAL....
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
It was often the case on the course I took at Durham, UK that lecturers would supply notes for a fee. Figuring this would not be allowed under this legislature, luckly UK not part of CA (yet).
The purpose of the legislation is to prohibit the commercial distribution of lecture notes WITHOUT the consent of the instructor.
This will not affect most on campus notetaking services, as they already ask for instructor's consent.
As an occasional instructor, I believe that this is a good legislation: I created the lecture, for the university, either I or the University should retain the copyright on the lecture.
Personally, I post my slides and have them available at a local copy shop before the lectures begin, because this is a useful service to the students. I don't gain any compensation from doing so, it just makes things easier both for myself and for my students.
But I don't believe that someone should be able to make a derivitive work (which a set of lecture notes would be, since they are a direct or nearly direct transcription of my presentation), and profit from it , without my consent.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Test your net with Netalyzr
Sorry California you do not have the authority. Title 17 of the US Code section 301(a):
301. Preemption with respect to other laws (a) On and after January 1, 1978, all legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright as specified by section 106 in works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression and come within the subject matter of copyright as specified by sections 102 and 103, whether created before or after that date and whether published or unpublished, are governed exclusively by this title. Thereafter, no person is entitled to any such right or equivalent right in any such work under the common law or statutes of any State.
Now, the current situation is totally different for a teacher who does not "fix" his or her lectures in a tangible medium, since federal copyright law requires fixation for protection. What this law does is extend copyright protection to all lectures regardless of fixation. Since a student (or other listener) usually doesn't even know whether the fixation requirement has been satisfied, the legality of selling lecture notes has always been questionable. This law just clarifies the situation with a uniform policy.
P.S. Nothing in the above should be interpreted as a statement on my personal belief of what a faculty member should do with his or her copyrights. Look, I'm a great believer in the GPL, and I think giving people the right to make noncommercial copies of my lectures is just the right thing to do. But just as code authors should be allowed to decide whether to use the GPL, I should have the right to choose the terms of copying of my intellectual work.
first day at sdsu I was informed by my english teacher/professor/whatever the hell their called that her lectures were her intellectual property and if anyone published them on the web (especially versity.com) she would file a lawsuit against the individual and give us an F. welcome to college.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
I doubt this is in the bill, but the presence in the introduction here caught my attention.
All images, sounds and ideas presented may not be re-used...
Copyright and ownership issues of notes, images, and sounds aside, that line is rather silly with the ideas bit in it. Is not part of the purpose of the education to instill concepts and ideas?
It may have been humorous exaggeration but I rather doubt even the densest of seats of higher learning would actually go as far as that. It defeats their purpose.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Of course, it's stupid to impose something like this on students. Can you imagine what you'd hear if you were a prof:
prof: You failed this test!
student: Only because I didn't have your notes.
prof: Why not?
student: I didn't want to violate any laws.
Sheesh.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
... I forgot everythings I learn from school. Otherwise they'd come after me for "distributing them commercially" in my work place.
If it happens up here in Seattleland, I'm up the creek. I've got a stack of lecture notes from magic lectures over the years. Can I sue the people who sold them to me?
...is that the University owns the notes. If you are teaching a course and you give the administration a copy of your notes they'll copy them and sell them just as they please. All you teachers out there, it is your course, don't give them your notes!
This law is simply ineffective. Federal copyright law forbids states from giving copyright-like rights. See 17 U.S.C. 301(a), which says, in part:
All legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright . . . in works of authorship that . . . come within the subject matter of copyright . . . are governed exclusively by this title. Therafter, no person is entitled to any such right or equivalent right in any such work under the common law or statutes of any State.
So, the legal analysis doesn't even get to the First Amendment or fair use!!
We're entering an era where all content and knowledge is easily record able, searchable, and distributable to the masses. This is already having an impact on traditional content industries (music, video) and we can expect these copyright battles to play out wherever information has value. Educational content, due to it's high relative cost, is a logical target.
Personally, I think that our higher education system has already worked very hard to defend it's revenue streams... and I think that this practice, intentional or not, is partly responsible for the growing divide between those-who-can-afford tuition and those-who-can-not.
Things have changed, and most areas of our education system simply haven't. We should be able to provide great education for 1/10th the cost of 20 years ago by fully using distance-learning technologies... but instead the cost of (higher) education has been skyrocketing. I don't want to criticize all educational institutions for falling behind -- many are working on novel technologies for distance and computer learning.
However, it seems that the use of these systems is minimal outside of a few major players.
So, what's next? Are we going to be distributing lecture notes on Gnutella... or could the outcome of the Napster court case have an impact on our right to distribute educational content as well?
This raises some very interesting intellectual rights issues.
Concerning this sentence: "If I draw a sketch of a painting, does the original artist own my sketch, too?"
I don't know about that, but, and though I am not a lawyer, I do know that it is not ok to make a painting based on another's copyrighted photograph and sell the painting without permission of the owner of the copyright of the photograph. So, my guess would be if you make a sketch of the painting, the same thing applies.
Bang the head that doesn't bang!
This is what the citizens of California get for electing a bunch of wacko socialists to the legislature. These people think the Constitution is just so much toilet paper when it gets in the way of achieving their utopian vision for us. If Governor Davis is dumb enough to sign this nonsense into law, I predict it'll be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, assuming that it even makes it that far. Meanwhile, consider this just another indicator of how little these dolts value free speech.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
I can't quite find the link, but I do remember that this was posted before last year, and one of the links was this.8 /story5.html
http://www.amcity.com/sanjose/stories/1999/11/0
Quite interesting, really.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
I'm kinda in the middle on this....the interests of students looking for lecture notes (they should've gone to class anyway but that's neither here nor there) versus the univeristies' sole right to sell, and that's what they're doing, the knowledge contained within their professors' heads. I don't believe some third party has a right to make money off information the university is paying professors to bring, so why not adopt a GPL mentality: you can charge for the media and the effort to copy the data onto said media but not for the data itself. See how many of these places keep selling lecture notes if they can only charge for paper and copies. Although a legistlature adopting a policy that they didn't invent from scratch is very unlikely.
I must also say its a pretty sad note on a number of students at our university levels that businesses that engage in this behavior can survive and thrive. I kinda doubt the majority of thier clients were good students who happend to come down with the flu for a day or two.
I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet... Unauthorized notes have the potential for being flat-out wrong. This is ultimately damaging to the students. I've seen this happen when I was a TA: the answer to why a large number of students got an exam question identically wrong was *not* that they were cheating, but they all studied on the same notes that had errors. It's a consumer group with a short memory (they graduate, move on to other classes, etc) so they are vulnerable to scammers. This measure might (might!) help.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
You said
So distributing handwritten notes(not teacher's notes!) should be okay
but the clause you quoted covers that:
This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium, including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten class notes.
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Infuriate left and right
You're right.
I missed that, when reading that.
But there's still the point/clause about "commercial purpose", right? I did get that right, didn't I?
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
The fundamental problem here is that too many lectures are wastes of the students' time because they simply recap material in the book. If the professors/lecturers actually took the effort to make their classes worth attending, then they would be attended. After all, the goal of education is not to attend lectures simply because they're there -- it's to learn (or, some would argue, to learn how to learn). If a student can learn more effectively and thoroughly by spending five hours a week with his nose buried in the book, doing problem sets, than by sitting through redundant lectures, then it would be foolish to suggest he sit through the lectures.
Sure, some number of students will use the lecture notes to beat the system. But I don't see how this is intellectually dishonest -- it's not as if you're copying someone else's exam answers or plagiarizing a paper, both of which entail representing someone else's work as your own. You're merely learning the material (perhaps not well) without attending the lecture, just as you could learn it (perhaps not well) by attending the lecture but not reading the assigned books.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Teaching itself is about passing on information across generations. Many students go on to become teachers themselves, and part of that is on passing on the teaching traditions of their own teachers. That, too, constitutes a use of "lecture notes" for commercial purposes, and if copyright is extended in this way, it threatens the continuity of teaching.
To me, this looks like a very short-sighted piece of legislation. Text book companies and professors may like it because it allows them to publish lecture notes as overpriced text books. But the long term implications, however, are very troubling to me since it affects the basis of our culture: the continuity of teaching across generations.
Sorry, I'm not buying it. The notes are not the education. There's no way that I could possibly claim to have a Stanford or a Harvard (or wherever) education simply by having read the notes from the classes there. It's not the same thing, and the Prof. should recognize this.
And, even if notes == education, then I have to think that it's just evolutionary pressure to get better, not whine about it.
Fair enough, but this bill doesn't ensure the quality of education either. It simply curtails free speech and commerce in the name of 'principle'. I don't think that's a sufficient reason.
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
Is it illegal to leave tape recorders on your desk? It might catch on, and then the prof would be lecturing to a bunch of tape recorders sitting on desks. HA! That sounds like a good scene for a movie. It would be even funnier if it starred Val Kilmer.
IANAL
Firstly, the bill defines a lecture as (my paraphrase) not recorded in any tangible medium. Then it bans class notes as a recording. So once the notes exist, the lecture is excluded.
Secondly, students pay tuition to receive knowledge from professors (they pay for the knowledge transfer) with the implied consent that they will use the knowledge to make a living (i.e. commercial gain, unless they go to work for a NPO).
At worst, the law tells them that they have to wait for the class to adjourn before they start to use what they've learned to earn money.
Thirdly, challenging this law looks like an ideal term project for a law student.
I say sell tickets to the trial (oops, I guess _that's_ probably illegal, or California would've made a mint from those two O.J. trials).
the road to hell is paved with good intentions
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
If you rely solely on purchased notes, and the notes are wrong, well, too bad for you. I, for one, don't want to live in a nanny state where the government decides what I can and can't read because I might do something stupid based on my naive assumption that anything in print must be true.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
sort of like development of an open-source class-notes archive...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
UCSB (University of California at Santa Barbara) has a university funded note taking service called "AS Note Taking Service" (AS standing for Associated Students). It's $25/quarter for a subscription or $4/ea for notes for a single day. I know a few people who subscribe to it, but that's it. The point is that the university supports AS, which supports this note taking service.
I for one am happy to see this. I think it is a crime for sites like Versity (who is bankrupt last I heard) to list the well-written notes of a professor. The whole reason the school hires a professor is for his or her ability to teach, and lecture notes play a decent role in that. Granted, notes aren't everything, but if you worked hard to create a great set of teaching tools, tweaked them every year, and relied on them as a sizable part of your job worth, you probably wouldn't enjoy your notes being posted on the web for free viewing so some punks can make $$$ on selling ad space around them.
(Yes, I have had a few prof's here at college speak out against note posting, and they won me over with their arguements)
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Let me give you the lowdown
The problem is that it's always been a war of control, whether it be money, wealth, power, information, distribution, production, access, choice, priviledge, rights, whatever.
For whatever reason, people will try to take from you whatever you are not willing to fight to protect. If you do not care for you rights, people, in their own self interest and for their own gain, will find a way to take away and use your lack of rights. If you do not care for your property, same. Lifestyle? Choices? whatever.
It's not corporate feudalism, whatever that truly means. If I'm not mistaken, corporate feudalism is about the submission/submersion of the individual to the group/division/company/corporation.
Akin to traditional feudalism, where the peasant swore fealty to the knight/samurai, who in turn owned his loyalty to a lord, up the chain of greater and greater lordships up to an emperor, king, ruler, or eventually, God.
In this case, it would be translated to employee's loyalty to boss, who's loyalty is to the division, who's loyalty is to the organization, which perhaps would then owe loyalty to the parent company, and upwards until we get to the corporation.
At least, that's what I think...
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
the state still pays more than the students
;-) ) the educational process, and allow average citizens access to this info. Sure it's not nearly as good as actually being in the class, but it's something and doesn't cost much/anything. It would also allow profs at lower level schools (community college) to lift ideas from much better profs, which in turn would mean that their students are getting better educations than they may have otherwise. Where is the harm?
The state, with OUR tax money, paid for those lectures to be created, so they should be public domain and (i believe) even audio and video recordings should be redistributable, either for free or for a fee (a fee would presumably give someone reason to try to take the BEST notes, so that people will want to buy theirs).
This would open up (open source?
The companies will get into either 'Just the notes (on the board), ma'am' or alternatively, 'exact transcripts including coughs and sneezes' note-taking methods. But that tends to lead to missing info (in the first case) or with way too much info (how to weed out off topic wanderings from What Is On The Test?). Either way, the students who buy the notes are either 1) not concerned with very high grades in that course (or they wouldn't trust someone else to interpret the lectures); 2) relatively lazy/uninterested in actually learning the subject (as opposed to learning for grades/just to pass); or 3) freshmen.
In 10 yrs (grad/undergrad & teaching) have found that the people who would buy notes are the ones who don't really pay attention or take many/good notes when they are in the classroom. So I don't think this is going to cause any 'new' issues in education, except perhaps to lead a few more freshmen (freshpersons?) astray.... But if they have more than a spoonful of grey matter, those wandering freshmen should have the prob. figured out by early second quarter/semester....
Of course I didn't finish college and wouldn't claim to have learned anything of particular value there, so on that front at least, I'm safe.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There's nothing to see here folks. Please it along.
The sale of copyrighted material and the free distribution of it are two entirely different realms.
Your reasoning is incomplete. I believe this legislation is ridiculous and the reasons you mention are directly related to this. (NOTE: This is a response to student's notes, not direct copies of lectures. The latter, I agree, should be a copyright violation, without express consent from the author.)
First, you state "I created the lecture." This is true, but what exactly is a lecture? It's your filtering of ideas (very likely not your own) into a format that can be presented in a short period of time. This can include your own thoughts and insights, but likely the vast majority of information is merely filtered information. (If you by some chance are the third- or forth-sigma professor who is presenting mostly original information, perhaps this does not apply, but I think broad legislation for Given this, you must now present your lecture to students who have paid the university (thus paying you), and who now must do a good deal of mental work for themselves to filter and process the information you've presented in order to understand it. After having paid you for your efforts, why should they be restricted in their efforts?
Let's extend the reasoning here, first backwards. If they are not allowed to profit off the information they've paid you for that you've gathered and processed, why should you be allowed to profit off information the authors of the books and materials you gathered your information from? Likely you didn't pay every author you have on your class bibiography. (You do have a biliography and at least give credit, right?) Libraries, for instance, and the web are wonderful resources. However, as you state, you don't want people making derivative works of your work and profiting from them!
Now let's continue to extend this in the other direction. Now that students have learned from you, after having paid you and done the work to learn, perhaps they shouldn't be able to profit at all! After taking your lecture, they should never be able to work and make money from the concepts they might have learned from your class.
This is of course, ridiculous. The reason we go to a university is to learn so that we, too, can extend our knowledge and someday be able to use it to support ourselves.
The real motive here is monopolization of the flow of information. Students could learn instead by going directly to your sources, but that would be more effort, perhaps an unreasonable effort, so they come to you, and you profit from this, because they are willing to pay. However, some students may be willing to pay for further help and further insight, yet you wish to limit this, because you wish to beh te only source of this information. I find that a rather appalling position for university faculty.
If we wish to completely limit the profitability of information, retain complete control on its flow and on the flow of profit from it, then information will never be able to be used. We are an information-based civilization. The implications are frightening.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I do enjoy being awarded karma points and all... but it feels bad to have gotten an +1 Insightful for admitting I didn't read the article entirely, though I guess one could argue I could get points, +1 underrated, for even reading the article, or being man enough to admit to being wrong/incorrect, but still... It just feels embarassing to have my admission of incorrectness highlighted like that.
Oh well, thank you, whichever moderator decided to bless me with this karma point ^^
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Here is a summary of some notes I took at university: k=1/2mv^2 F=ma c=300,000 kps I can't sell these notes?
This sounds like just another special interest who lobbied the bill into existence to preserve some income that they perceive as threatened, OR to take income away from some outfit that they *perceive* as competition because the other outfit offers the same service at a lower price than the "approved" service. This sort of legislation happens regularly in California.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I go to one of the UC schools (check my email address to see which one), and I can affirm that this is definitely the case in many lectures. Some professors (at least one that I had) have such well structured lecture notes that they could practically be published in a book. These lectures are the professors' intellectual property, whether they are at that level or not. Many a professor has been very ticked off to discover that people have been auditing the class just to sell lecture notes, which are very close approximations of the professors' personal creations.
Interestingly, part of the explanatory text of the bill points out that "[e]xisting case law provides that in the absence of evidence of agreement to the contrary, a teacher, rather than the institution for which he or she teaches, owns the common law copyright to his or her lectures." That does seem to make some sense, but are notes "the lecture"? If I draw a sketch of a painting, does the original artist own my sketch, too? (Or in this case, does the University of California?)
The reason for this is that the common law copyright was expressly abrogated in the Copyright Act of 1976 with few exceptions (see
Copyright Act Section 301, which preempts most state law trying to ape copyright law. The few exceptions include works that have not been fixed in tangible media, such as extemporaneous speeches.
However, they will have a great deal of trouble here: Most professors give their lectures from notes, effectively providing a public performance of a work (the notes) that WAS fixed in tangible media. In such cases, the California Bill may well have been preempted, and the case reverts to questions of whether notes taken by an audience constitute infringement, fair use or original restatments by a student of the unprotectable IDEAS of a lecture.
Long and short of this -- the litigation over this bill may be very interesting (read expensive and complicated). Supremacy and Commerce clause cases make for great lawyering -- although they may seem quite dull to most lay audiences.
IANAL and all, but the gist I got from actually reading the bill makes it sound like it's only prohibiting full reproductions (like word-by-word transcripts), not mere summaries. Does anyone know if that's true?
In my opinion, if it just limits transcripts and the like, that's fine. I teach at UC Berkeley, and the facts that I teach are public domain, not mine. But I do consider my lectures to be mine. I try to present material in a way that will help students understand it and see connections they might not otherwise see. Presumably that's one of the services that students are paying for with their college fees (and why UC is paying me), since almost all of the facts covered are available for free in the library. On the other hand, if someone summarizes the facts I present, that's probably fair use. I don't see this as much different from a textbook -- the facts in a textbook aren't protected, but the author's particular way of presenting the material is.
(Of course, if they're trying to outlaw selling any notes, I can see where that might be a problem.)
A liberal interpretation IMHO, unless you mean "I own[sic] the copyright as long as I fix them in a tangible medium. But note that is the copyright on that expression of your work that you hold (not own). Your lectures themselves are not fixed in a tangible medium unless recorded, in case it is the recording that is copyrighted, not the intangible 'original lecture.' A set of lecture notes taken by you, a student, etc. may be a simply a "derivative work" -- or may be a creative interpretation that presents the material to someone else in a unique, copyrighted manner, as a legitimate 'study aid' -- or more likely, complete bunk that bears little relationship to what you said, but nonetheless bears copyright protection (at least this is the problem with Black Lightening &etc at Berkeley).
Your own lecture notes, of course, would be copyrighted and good proof of the extent to which any student's work was 'derivative' or 'creative reporting.' Nonetheless, what the legislature is attempting scares me, in that it restricts the distribution of "lecture notes" without any test of their derivative or creative merits, thus, in restriction of free speech.
Fortunately, they have about a snowball's chance in hell:
What this law does is extend copyright protection to all lectures regardless of fixation
Definition of the extent of copyright is reserved for the US Congress and the interpretation of the courts; moreover, in the last several cases to reach them, the Supremes have indicated they would oppose further Congressional restriction of fair use, even in commercial setting. This legislation is dead in the water.
And a good thing, too. The core of the problem that the legislature is trying to address is that many UC students rely on lecture notes instead of class, for whatever reason. (I write after having been a UC instructor, primarily in the humanities, familiar with the on-campus issue). "Lecture Notes" are particularly insulting, particularly when a parent or community member brings them to you and asks, "Is this what you're teaching?" They remind us -- and especially administrators -- of the failures of the UC system. But those are educational failures, and this level of highhandedness -- while typical -- certainly will not solve those problems.
Finally, I can't help but noting that there is a internet-phobia in all of this, the profound realization that Universities make their money by hoarding knowledge, and that the freedom of knowledge on the Internet challenges that profoundly.
I could see arguing that a transcript of a lecture is a derived work. But notes that summarize it? No way. That's journalism.
This makes me sad. Yes, it's lame that companies are profiting off this information. On the other hand, I would have killed to have this kind of thing around when I was a kid. Number theory? Graph theory? Oh, here, check out these notes from Ma119. I'm in favor of any fair solution that allows the curious kid to get his hands on this sort of thing. Preserving intellectual property rights comes in a close second.
this sets the precident for banning programmers from being "inspired" by one person's source code to write their own equivalent code.
Precisely why RMS doesn't read UNIX® source code. The known legal workaround for this is "clean room R.E.": have one team translate the source code into a specification written in English or other similarly human-comprehensible notation, and have another team translate it back into C. And make sure all communication that passes over the Great Wall is logged so if they "see you in court," you'll have evidence that you used legal R.E. techniques.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
First, if you go to an article in the Village Voice, linked to on the "for the ban" page linked to in the original story, you find some hilarious examples of notes that have been posted on the web...for pay. Here's an example, notes from a class on Hamlet:
"FROM STUDY24-7.COM: Boston University English: Hamlet--Act II, III (Part V)
"ACT III, SCENE 1
"The 1st soliloquoy [sic]--can't commit suicide *damned
"The 2nd soliloquoy--maybe it was the Devil to damn me
"The 3rd soliloquoy--To be or not to be (kill myself?)
"Constantly mentioning conscience
"How does this and "enterprises of great pitch & moment" fit into suicide?
"Enterprises = momentous acions [sic]."
This and similar gems here: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0003/hussey-mcp herson.shtml
Looks like you're better off going to class.
Secondly, according to the article in the Voice, VC companies are hiring college kids, getting them to stay up late typing and posting lecture notes on the web. Then the copyright on the notes belongs not to the kid, who has to sign them away to the company in order to get paid, not to the professor, but to the company. The student gets a fee. The professor gets nothing (except maybe humiliated, along with the University, when he sees the above as a reflection of what he taught.)
Here's a segment from the article, explaining the process:
"More than 10 online companies now offer free notes for thousands of lectures in over 100 universities and colleges. These ventures, the largest being StudentU.com and Versity.com, recruit 'campus team leaders' or 'campus operations managers' from the student body, who then locate notetakers and market the service on campus. Trained by the company, notetakers have an average GPA of 3.0, must post lecture notes within 24 hours (and arrange for a substitute scribe if they fall ill), and relinquish any claims to copyright, all for a paycheck. (StudentU will pay $400 per semester in spring 2000; Versity pays a per-lecture fee of $8 to $12 an hour.)
"'It beats waiting tables or bartending on the weekends. It's not a lot of money, but it helped me live in a nicer apartment. I'm earning money while I study and am helping my classmates,' says Phillips, who earned $600 last semester."
Assuming the above facts are true, the purpose of bill appears to be to try to address these issues. Barlow wrote once that if *anyone* were going to make money from his writing, he certainly felt it ought to be him. The bill is saying exactly the same thing, namely that the professor, not the school, not a VC company, owns the copyright. Actually, the professor already does own the copyright. The bill just says what will happen if someone infringes it. The professor's free to give it away, GPL it, whatever. Students can still share notes, for free, with their friends. At least this is my understanding.
If I posted something clueless about coding, you'd probably get annoyed and express it, and rightly so, because I don't know enough to sound off around this group on that subject. The point is, I *know* I don't. But when it comes to legal issues, there's more, lots more, to it than meets the eye on first impression. I'm not saying don't think and read and post...just realize that there's depths to the field, just like in your field, and take the time -- and it does take time --to really understand the law. I wish /. would hire a lawyer to help with this kind of story. Then we could all use our Fridays nights better than we did tonight.
Jeez. I used to work for a lecture note company (Versity.com) so perhaps I'm a little biased, but.. It seems pretty clear that the state is just looking to make some money. They've got a deal with one company that handles all of the notes for the UC system, and they didn't want anyone getting in on their turf. In fact I believe professors aren't allowed to give permission to anyone but the official company.
That said, the point should be moot... distributing the professor's notes is illegal, but a student's interpretation has always been legal. Cliff Notes won that battle in the 60's. I'd like to see this sonofabitch stand up in court.
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
And you are only allowed to use that knowledge [which is only liscenced to you and belongs soley to the university] for the puposes of working as a knowledge and skill implementor in relationships with professional services firms in contract with the university?
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man sig
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
I work for Arizona State University. In order to abide by the 11th commandment, which is CYA, I must give notice that nothing I'm writing here in any way represents an official or unofficial policy or point of view on the part of Arizona State University, its boad of regents, employees, or the state legislature. This post is submitted without any warranties either implied or explicit, use at your own risk.
There are at least a couple of local companies near campus who pay students to take notes. These notes are then sold to other students. The policy of most instructors is that if a student is caught taking notes for one of these services, they'll be kicked out of the class and recieve an F.
When you stop and consider the fact that the people who are going to be most interested in buying these notes are other students in the class, it really makes you wonder what the issue is. If I'm not enrolled in a university and taking a particular class, what real interest am I going to have in someone's notes for that class? If I have an interest in a particular subject there are almost always books available which provide much more information than I'd be able to glean from someone's lecture notes.
Thus the IP issue is really just a smokescreen. You're teaching a class and therefore being paid to provide information/instruction to students. If some of your students choose to purchase lecture notes then wouldn't it stand to reason they'll learn more? Are you going to similarly restrict them from reading other materials, such as books and articles, which you have not personally read aloud to them in class? Is the purpose of going to class to learn or is it to furiously write down every word you say because you're just so great? I go to class to learn. If you're there because of your ego that is your problem.
One of the other arguments I hear often is that these services lower student attendance. Now this I do consider to be a true issue. If someone is taking a class, they should go to class. They shouldn't just buy lecture notes and maybe study the book. Reading lecture notes is no substitute for person to person instruction. The solution to this problem is simple, take attendance and make it part of the grade. Some instructors have already begun doing that here. If a student misses more than so many days of class, then they'll not pass unless they have a very good documented reason why they were not there.
I personally almost never take notes. I'm there to learn and understand and I find that writing everything down interferes with that as it splits my attention. If there is some detail that isn't obvious or in the textbook, then I'll write that down with a note about its context. But otherwise I spend my time listening, thinking and working to comprehend the subject matter. I find that many people don't do that. Instead they try to memorize things, which is far more difficult than understanding them and in the end is self defeating. Someone might be able to get away with this in a general studies history or sociology class, but if they're taking math or science as part of their major, they're not going to make it very far with that approach.
Ultimately I don't truly understand what justifiable gripe universities and instructors have with these services. I can think of quite a few unjustifiable gripes, such as loss of control, loss of ego, undermining of their imagined authority etc. There are probably other irrational reasons as well that I'm not aware of. I'm not a psychologist, so when individuals and institutions start acting nutty I usually don't understand all the reasons why.
It would be refreshing if the universities and instructors would simply tell the truth and give their actual heart felt reasons for opposing these services. But of course they'll never do that because they would immediately discredit themselves.
I'm waiting and hoping that the ACLU will get in on this. Till then I'd expect a very profitable underground economy to spring up around the buying, selling and trading of lecture notes.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
At Carnegie Mellon, I am glad that notes for most lectures are put on the web for free. But I don't think that this ruling is intended to stop students from sharing notes among each other. This is clearly protected under the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, which as far as I know are as strong as ever. Any educational purpose is sufficient to provide fair use. This ban can only stop an industry that aims at the pocketbooks of college student, not their minds.
Get a life. Go to class. That's what you pay (34,000!) dollars a year for; the library is free. You can always read somebody's book, but a lecture is something else. A professor should absolutely have the right to commercial profit made from their work. Nobody else should.
I can't believe that the Slashdot community is opposed to this bill; this is the very essence of a corporate whorism taking over our educational system.
Ceci n'est pas un post
The whole point of attending university is to gain knowledge and skill which will increase a students value to the economy. Obviously many attend university for other reasons, but the vast majority of students are students so they can profit, whether it be financially or otherwise, from the knowledge imparted by their lecturers, textbooks, fellow students and tutors. The whole point of attending a lecture and taking notes is to profit from them. In fact, if youre not paying for a license to use that information when you sign up for a university course, i fail to understand what is being provided for the money you pay. Whats next - a lawsuit by the EIAA (Education Industry Association of America) against Notester, the peer-to-peer lecture not sharing system?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I completly disagree with attendance policies, I disagreed when I was a student, I disagreed when I was an instructor, and I still disagree today out in the corporate world. If you want students to attend your classes, then you need to teach better than they can learn on their own, either make the leanring easier or more enjoyable than what they can accomplish out there. That's it.
I had a Genetics instructor who never did anything except regurgitate what was in the book, and often got confused about it himself. I never attended class after the first exam and I never made less than 100% on his tests (he gave bonus questions). I did not need to attend his classes to learn the material and I didn't find attending them useful.
I had a Calculus instructor who humiliated a student asking a question the first day of class and I simply decided that day that he was a jerk and I refused to learn from him. He had an attendance policy, so I showed up every class period and read pornography in his class as obviously as possible. Again, I scored over 100% on each and every test he gave - I learned the material myself (much more difficult than Genetics was).
I've also had many, many excellent teachers, instructors whom assisted me in understanding the material, whose lectures I enjoyed. I didn't wish to learn the material on my own because it was easier and more enjoyable to learn it with them.
When I taught, in addition to classes, I held regular office hours and 4-hour review sessions a couple days before tests (students could come and go at any time during the review session, no one had to be there for 4 hours except me). I also was rather nuts about working around schedules - I had one student who left school right after lab for a second shift job whom I met at midnight to give extra help to. And while I would not fail someone for not showing up at class, I'd not cut ANY slack on a borderline grade for anyone who missed a lot of classes, skipped all the review sessions and never asked for help at all. But on the other hand, if someone showed up just for the four exams in a lecture course, they got whatever grade they earned on tests (this obviously couldn't apply to lab courses).
I still teach - I teach HTML, JavaScript, VBScript and ASP at work. And one of *my* requirements is that I won't teach a class consisting of people who didn't choose to take it - managers are not allowed to require anyone to take my classes. And the notes are available on the intranet for those who wish to learn without my assistance. My classes remain popular though.
and indeed, may go too far, it appears that what the bill is intended to do is prevent someone from transcribing a lecture and selling it.
And this makes sense. See, what if someone was selling access to a web site, or a periodical that had all the U of C lectures for the year? Even the evening after the lecture? Wouldn't quite seem right, eh?
They simply want their lectures to remain their property, as works of art. (consider l¼ ring a performance, perhaps)
What this law represents is yet another attempt at squelching what I refer to as "Information Transport Crime". Before the Internet, these laws were not percieved to be needed because information flowed so slowly.
In direct disagreement with many of the cheerleaders in this post,...Sorry folks, there is no good aspect to this law, because it sets the stage for a tidal wave of new "Derivative Information Possesion and Transport" laws.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this law is that it starts out by reciting that the universities and the faculty can and do hold copyright to instructional materials. No problem here. But somehow, this law allows that copyright to magically leap from the information presented in a non-affixed performance media (the lecture), to a secondary, derivative AND INTREPRETIVE affixed work penned by a second party!
If I was the RIAA and MPAA, I'd be all over my lobbiest screaming "WHY DON'T I HAVE AN EFFIN LAW LIKE THIS ONE!!!". Imagine the POWER. The power to CONTROL what other's say about your works and your deeds. You could muzzle your critics and squelch unfavorable comment about what you write, say and do.
Be afraid.
Very afraid.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Well, it's nice someone's promoting free education by keeping people from reading about what's said in college classrooms. Now if we could only round up those darned books...
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Why is it whenever there's an incident which involves banning something, a bunch of ppl on /. start ranting on how it has free speech issues and how the corporate work is sleeping with the gov't to destroy the common working man?
If I was a lecturer giving a lecture, I wouldn't want people selling my lecture notes for a profit. For those of you who think everyone should have a right to sell lecture notes, would you say they had the same right to videotape the said lecture and sell those too?
You're free to agree or disagree with the ban, but don't drag poor old free speech into it when it's not an issue. Everyone is still free to share notes around without selling them.
---
The RMS thing seems awfully paranoid in the context in which you want to put it. It still doesn't negate the fact that this isn't about the "notes equaling the education". It's about the redistribution of original material, the lecture. It is sold as "the lecture". If someone wanted to write a commentary on Derrida's lectures, that is one thing. But to record and sell his lectures is another is another. It's that simple.
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Since I'll eventually have to explain this to students and have basic understanding of the rules within UC, I'll chime in with what I think is going on. [IANAL]
A UC instructor has commented on his opinion on this matter and is correct on a number of points. Copyright is, by default, held by the instructor and not the university. The syllabus for the course is a legal document that sometimes grants students non-commerical duplication rights for personal use. But nweaver fails to address the case of handwritten notes.
There's a loophole here that I think the legislature is trying to plug:
Copyright law protects the preparation of derivative works.
Pertinent bits from the above:
"Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work."
Given that abridgements, compilations, dramas based on novels, sculptures based on drawings, and so on serve as examples of derivative works, lecture notes don't seem like much of a stretch.
So, I don't really think there is anything new here. However, there seems to be nothing stating definitively that lecture notes are in fact derivative works. So rather than test this in court over and over, legislating it would seem prudent. It's now in black and white, and penalties attached.
This strikes me as a pre-emptive move against problems that will likely crop up when the UC and CSU have to fully invest in distance learning. The 9 UC campuses have been warned that they'll have to absorb an additional 70,000 students over the next 10 years (the equivalent of Berkeley and UCLA combined), and the entire public higher education system in CA will have to take about 700,000 over what they currently serve (roughly the total population of Delaware).
Now, given that the dear taxpayers of California (of which I am one) are likely unwilling to build the equivalent of twenty major universities over the next 10 years, alternatives will have to be found - and distance learning will be a big component of that.
With 2 million students enrolled in higher ed in California in 2010, the low cost of distribution thanks to the internet, and the (hopefully) ease of electronic payment by that time, there's a hell of a big market here for people to tap for distribution of lecture notes, papers, and so on. Watch for more legislation to come...
I Agree.
From now on, I will no longer seek the coveted first post. I am now on a mission for Very Early Posts; A much more attainable goal.
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
The notion that you have a copyright to some form of a recording of you is also not at all universally applicable. For example, if a photographer takes a picture of you, the photographer has the copyright, not you.
Nobody ever promised professors that they would be able to retain intellectual property rights on their lectures. The whole purpose of teaching is to convey information that the students record and further disseminate. Why on earth would we want to change the rules now and in this sensitive area?
I'm not worried about the ethics of it or any copyright violations that it may involve. I just know that it irritated the CRAP out of me every time I'd go to a lecture and there was somebody shoving a flyer in my face urging me to take notes for them so they could sell them. And of course, when the class was over, there'd be hundreds of flyers littering the floor and the hallways. And of course there's the 50 people that insist on crumpling them up loudly while class is in session. That always pissed me off. It would have been nice not to have been bothered by those people and their flyers.
"It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
Time is fun when you're having flies.
-Kermit the Frog
If I draw a sketch of a painting, does the original artist own my sketch, too?
Yes. If you create a work of art which is primarily a reproduction or representation of a copyrighted work, and release it commercially, it is a copyright violation. The best example I am aware of is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posters. Someone took a photo of the Rock Hall in Cleveland, OH, made a poster of it, and distributed it commercially. I.M. Pei, the architect, successfully sued.
The limit is "fair use" which covers such things as reviews and satire. You can read more about fair use on Stanford's site at http://fairuse.stanford.edu/
Bob
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
But that's not what the bill says. Here is the relevent section:
At best, it's sloppy legislation; it leaves far too many holes open. If the goal is to prevent wholesale recording/distribution of lectures, it should say that, and leave the vague wording out. And, I still think it would/will fail to pass constitutional muster as written.
At worst, RMS is an optimist with R2R.
As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere between the two extremes. But if you want truely paranoid... What if the driving force behind the bill is the desire of the profs/university to publish their own materials without any competition??
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
I admit that the "give" is worrisome, however anyone can write a commentary on anything. By which I mean that you can take notes and then write your own analysis on the lecture and publish it. This would constitute an original work, and is what most academic works are. However I have to concede that you are correct in the assessment that the bill is too restrictive and will probably not pass as a result. On the other hand, I don't see the problem with profs publishing their own material. That is what academic presses are for. And they ain't making tons of dough off it either. If Stephen King came to my local bookstore and read from an upcoming work and I wrote it down and published it, how fast do you think it would take his lawyers to put me in jail? Pretty fast I bet.
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Ahhh - but he couldn't sue you for taking notes and publishing a summary, or review of his work.
This isn't really about verbatim copies of lectures - its about notes.
I dunno where you learned to take notes - but I was always taught that writting lectures verbatim makes for quite useless notes.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
However, the California legislation protecting the professors' lectures specifically limits its scope to works which are NOT fixed in a tangible medium. Thus, it is not preempted by Federal Copyright. Look at Sec 302(b) of the FCA to see what I'm talking about.
Now, just how many professors fail to commit their lectures to writing or typing prior to presenting them to their classes I can't say. And thus the practical impact of the California legislation is unclear to me. If those profs were to write down their lectures beforehand, they fix it in a tangible medium, thus they can't use the California law to protect their rights. But then they can go on ahead and use Federal Copyright to prevent the lecture note sellers from infringing on whatever IP rights the profs may have in their lectures.
By the way, California has had legislation on the books for many many years which already grants copyright-like status to the the author of any kind of authorial work which is not otherwise protected under Federal Copyright law (i.e any work that is NOT fixed in a tangible medium). This lecture note law is aimed at adding new protections and procedures to a specific kind of un-fixed work, a category which would have already been protected to an extant under the prior California law.
Just for your info, examples of authorial works which are NOT covered by the FCA, because they are not fixed in a tangible medium are things like impromptu sermons or speeches, improvised dance choreography or jazz music, improv comedy routines, lectures composed in the prof's head, musical arrangements or compositions which have not yet been put down on tape or in writing, improvised poetry or raps such as are comon at Poetry Slams, radio talk show banter if they're not being recorded on tape, and on and on. If it's not written or recorded down, Federal Copyright does not protect it, and thus Federal law can't preempt a state law protecting it.
Another common kind of quasi-copyright state law are state laws prohibiting bootlegging of live concerts without the permission of the performers; the live performance itself might not be being recorded at the time of performance, thus is not fixed in a tangible medium, and thus the performers' rights under copyright to be protected as authors of the live performance will not be protected by Federal Copyright.) The composers of the songs would still have rights, so long as they had written down or recorded the pieces before the performance.) So there's all these state laws on the books to protect musicians from being bootlegged, and they fit into the same copyright preemeption loophole that the California lecture notes law does.
Have at it. Enough.
Ed