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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"
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.
----
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?
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
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...
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.
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."
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.
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
(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.
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.
...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!!
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." IANAL but play one online. :)
International Waters is a legal concept worth clarifying.
Every nation in the world with a water border, whether lake, river, or ocean, has a region around them which is Their Sovereign Territory. For example, the Great Lakes besides Lake Chicago.. err.. Michigan all share the border with Canada, and are, by treaty, split along the midpoint with the two countries. There are rivers in Europe which make national boundries, and the rule is that at the geographic halfway point is where the country's sovereign territory starts.
Now, oceans are a hell of a lot larger than rivers or lakes. So, how do you demark the amount of waterspace is a country's?
Each country declares a certain amount, true, but the normal amount recognized is 12 nautical miles. (Yes, some countries claim 200 plus. BFD.)
Inside that 12-mile (or whatever) area, you are fully subject to the national and regional (if applicable) laws of whatever country's area it is. For example, you yacht off the UN building in NYC, you are subject to NYC, New York State, and US law.
When you are in international waters, no specific nation's laws apply. However, you can't just murder in IW and get away with it! Most likely scenario if you commit a felonious act (read: damned serious crime) in IW is that, upon arriving at a port of call, is your butt gets thrown into the slammer.
The security forces of a ship are the effective police force aboard. Ships usually carry a brig where serious criminals are detained until an effective law enforcement agency can take custody of the individual.
However, there are many, many concepts of International Law which apply to IW. Example: Sealand was abandonded property in IW, so the former Lieutenant now Prince of Sealand was able to claim the former military installation and claim it as a separate nation. (Long story. Check Slashdot's older pages, amen.)
Main rule of IW is: Lower drek ain't important, what you finds you keeps, and the big stuff will eventually be punished.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
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.
--
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 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?
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?
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.
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 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?
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.
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)
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
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...
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?