Lecture Notes Considered Infringement

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a new lawsuit, taking notes in class is copyright infringement. Of course, it's not quite that simple. The professor is partnered with an E-book maker that wants to sell the material themselves, and the people taking notes pay students to take good ones, then sell copies to everyone else. But that just means that the case will hinge upon whether or not lecture notes are fair use. Either way, I wonder how long it will be before you will have to sign a EULA whenever you walk into class"

Comments

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

*Sigh*

The meaning of fair use is as confused here as the meaning of Godwin's Law. Fair use is a defense, not a right. No material is fair use. That material is only used in a way where if it were to be challenged in a lawsuit, a fair use defense would prevail. How the material is used is just as important as what type of material it is. This is why you can't make a blanket protection with a fair use defense. For those who want a blanket protection, it is called public domain, GFDL, or CCL.

"Teaching the Students" != Students Selling Notes

[Chibi Merrow]

I happen to have been one of those "employees", until just recently, and I was involved in a minor scandal regarding republishing of lecture notes. I was a Research Assistant involved in helping teach a Senior/Graduate level computer graphics course. As part of the course, we provided PDFs of the lecture notes and slides on the University's Moodle site for students to use as study aids. Two of the students decided they were going to get rich, started a commercial, advertisement supported website to host lecture notes, and took the PDFs from the Moodle site for our class and put them on there.

There's three obvious problems with this:

1) The files are marked "not for distribution outside of class"
2) The files are available freely to anyone actually enrolled in the class, making a mirror pointless (especially one which makes the mirrorer money...)
3) The slides, in addition to having copyrighted works of the professor and RAs teaching the class, include excerpts from textbooks and supplementary materials from the publishers, reproduction of which is legal in limited (ie: academic) circumstances by a Professor but expressly forbidden for commercial use. The distribution of them on the Moodle site was done only for the benefit of the students, but if the publisher were to find these materials being distributed from a commercial site and track their origin back to us, we could be held liable.

In the case of us (the faculty) being held liable, we'd have no choice but to just NOT distribute any of these materials, which just screws over the students in the end (I'd like to see them pass the exam without them!). In the end, the two students involved were pointed to the notices on Moodle (and the syllabus) not to distribute the slides/notes and given a choice whether to remove the files from their site or receive an F... Thankfully they chose to remove the files.

So you want to sell your lecture notes? Fine, but make sure they're YOU'RE lecture notes, not just a copy of what the Professor's provided... A better option would be to use something like Moodle inside your University to share notes between fellow classmates... If your University doesn't have something like Moodle/Blackboard available for students, get on their case.