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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"
The end game to all this will be copyright being abolished due to it being rendered unworkable.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Wouldn't it be considered fair use since it's for educational purposes?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
No, in fact, all of his works can be found on Project Gutenberg, although you may notice a good number of minor differences from the versions you have seen before because any published edition has copyrighted touch-ups to the spelling and formatting.
Centralization breaks the internet.
The "original form" doesn't exist.
What we have are incomplete and sometimes contradictory readings based on the manuscripts that found their way into print.
Shakespeare himself was perfectly capable of cutting and splicing scenes that ran too long or got in the way of a successful bit of stage business that appealed to an audience.
His plays will always have to be edited for reading and performance.
What's the difference with the *IAA? As far as I know, only the most extreme elements of the anti-*IAA movement believe copyright should be abolished. Most believe copyright is useful, but the pendulum has swung too far in favor of copyright holders. For the professor's actions to parallel the *IAA, he would have to be filing lawsuits against random students and ebook distributors in a fishing expedition. Instead, he's doing exactly what everyone here has been asking of the *IAA - track down through legal means exactly who is doing the infringing, and file suit against them.
How is publishing his own original research a breach of ethics? Professors everywhere already do just that. Most do it in journals related to their field, while some may also publish a book or something similar based on that research.
And since when are all college courses simply "standard knowledge in a field"? Clearly, you have not taken any higher level college courses beyond the requirements for a bachelors degree. Professors teaching a doctorate, or sometimes even masters, level course most definitely teach based on their own original research. I've even taken undergraduate courses with professors who taught based on their own research to a certain degree. In that case, it was only to enhance the "standard knowledge", but in many graduate level courses, it's the original research that is being taught.
I will say that I do agree that this whole copyrighting of lecture notes is a bit crazy, but only when you consider that some entrepreneurial student might try to sell their lecture notes from this class, which I consider to be legally questionable in the first place, regardless of whether or not a professor is doing it himself.
please me, have no regrets.
"Why do university students always forget that the professors are their employees?"
The word you're looking for is "tenure."
"It works, at my alma mater I saw a professor let go when his classes dropped to zero enrollment because he had sufficiently pissed off his students."
And in mine I saw a university resort to either marking classes taught by "staff" or "accidentally" reversing which professors taught which sections, all to ensure that the students had already committed to their schedule before they stroll into class on the first day to see who will really be teaching them.
Worst case scenario: put him on sabbatical for a little bit. Students move on, either by graduating or dropping out, so the collective memory of the student body only goes back so far.
Actually, you should be listening to your own advice: the professor is the university's employee, so this money-making tactic probably has the implicit consent (if not the explicit endorsement) of the higher-ups in the continuing quest to milk money from the students.
Students are neither the boss nor the customer, they are (one* of) the product(s). A campus' reputation rises and falls with the quality of its products.
* - Research is the other major product. Several people have already noted that a lot of professors spend more time on research than on students. That's because like anybody else, they follow the incentive systems, and Department Heads, Deans, Provosts, and Campus Presidents all know that research grants put a lot more money in their hands than tuition does.
It is worth noting, UF has been critical of the practice of profiting off of course materials for some time - and Moulton has been expressly targetted for criticism. This is an older article on the situation.
As someone who teaches at UF, the opportunities to distribute material to students for free or without profiting are numerous - there are multiple places that will print coursepacks within walking distance of the University, and the library provides an excellent electronic reserves system over which digital materials can be distributed. The only reason to distribute course notes for $50-100 electronically, as Professor Moulton does, is to make money off of your students.
Other professors at UF, as described in the article, offer $30 e-workbooks of extra credit through companies they own - in other words, directly allowing students the option of paying the professor for higher grades.
The depth of conflict of interest involved here is disgusting. Regardless of the legal merits of the case (I am not a lawyer and do not know), UF should forbid this sort of naked profiteering off of students.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
William Shakespeare himself was a victim of piracy by Elizabethan and Jacobean printers, who would send their agents to see his plays in order to memorize and reproduce them for illicit reproduction and sale. An excellent account of this practice may be found in "Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates" by Alfred W Pollard. Plus ca change...
Even if we were to make the jump that the professor's idea's are copywriteable then I'd have to ask the question of what exactly you're paying for when you pay your tuition?
Theoretically aren't your paying for the transmittal and indefinite future use of the ideas discussed in the class? If not then what exactly are your tuition bills paying for?
Collector's Edition