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

Relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Re:Relevant

[CityZen]

I was just thinking that professors should apply copyleft or perhaps GPL to their lectures.

After all, if he or she is a REAL professor, he or she will want the knowledge to be spread & shared as much as possible.

Re:Relevant

[cattywhumpus]

No the lecture notes are NOT fair use. They're a completely new work and the copyright is owned by the student who took them. Remember, it's not the facts that can be copyrighted, it's the expression. Now if a court reporter took down the lecture verbatim, or someone recorded it, you might be able to make a case. But notes? No way. No how.

Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Taking lecture notes isn't what's claimed to be copyright infringement, only re-selling the notes for a profit. Fair use does not provide for commercial reproduction.

Re:Correction

[moderatorrater]

Fair use does allow for certain things to be reproduced commercially. How do you write an analysis of Shakespeare (a derived work that's covered by Fair Use, btw) without deriving it somewhat from Shakespeare? Cliff Notes are a commercial reproduction of the main points of the story; isn't that what lecture notes are?

Furthermore, the university should be protecting these students by threatening to end the contract. If the book maker's going to be anal about this, they're going to be anal about something else that's important to the university. Also, an attack on the university's students should be viewed as an attack on the university itself. Every other college should be avoiding these guys like the plague too.

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.

Re:Correction

[gujo-odori]

Movie-goers who take detailed notes during a movie to later re-sell them for a profit are usually called "reviewers." A studio wouldn't have an ice cube's chance in hell of winning a lawsuit against a reviewer who published a movie review. Both the reviewer and the paper profit, and that's totally fair. There's nothing wrong with selling your lecture notes, either. Moreover, in every class I took in college, the lecture was sufficiently derived from the course textbook (none of which were written by the prof teaching the course) that there's no reasonable way a claim of infringement could stand up in court.

Re:Correction

[Original Replica]

the university should be protecting these students by threatening to end the contract.

Why do university students always forget that the professors are their employees? "The university" doesn't have to do jack, the students need to all drop all of that professors classes. 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. I'm all for professors making a nice buck on the side, publishing or consulting or researching, right up until it starts to effect the quality of work that makes them professors; teaching the students.

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK YOU for correcting the mistakes in this forum about fair use not being a right. When I see posts like that it makes me crazy about how uninformed people are, but I was at work and couldn't post back.

But unfortunately you made some errors in your explanation as well, so please indulge me while I make some slight refinements to your argument and corrections.

There is no question that fair use is a right. Just because it is also a legal defense doesn't matter - the two are not mutually exclusive.

Hey, Slashdot dummies who never got any civics education in school? Here is the basic primer - play along now...

The whole premise behind US government is that every person is endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. In order to protect these rights, citizens consent to the government placing a few restrictions on people - the whole purpose of the restrictions is to stop people using their rights in a way that takes away other people's rights. It's supposed to be a balancing act.

So for example, my creator gave me the ability (the "right") to swing my arm around with my fist closed. There are a few laws that reasonably limit that, though. The essence of the state of those laws is as if they are saying, okay, swing your arms with closed fists all you like. We'll even specifically condone doing so and clobbering someone else's head under controlled circumstances (boxing). Otherwise, make sure when you're swinging you don't crash your fist into somone else's head, or property.

So you wanna go out into a field and swing your arms when nobody is nearby? Of course, you have that right. Want to do so in your house, for ten hours straight - and even clobber your own furniture? Sure, you were born with that right. But we, the government that you created, are going to stop you if your arm swinging hurts someone else ... and only then.

ALL US laws are like that - every single one. So when you think about the law, never talk about government giving people rights - under the US theory, that's impossible. You're born with 100% of the rights that you are capable of exercising.

Instead, start from the premise that you have the right to do ANYTHING you want ... unless for some reason because you could hurt other people, there is some limited government law slightly restricting your right.

So, repeat after me - fair use is a right. It's also a defense in copyright lawsuits (the nature of the defense is more accurately stated along the lines of "But, hey! I have a defense! I was exercising my rights!") Fair use is a right. There are a few restrictions on your originally 100% fair use rights, meant to protect copyright holders from being harmed by you. Those restrictions, and the way your fair use rights work in relation to those restrictions -- are described in part in copyright statutes.

But there are reams of case law stating specifically that you have way many more fair use rights than are described in the statutes. Which of course is as it should be and only makes sense. You start from the premise that you have 100% ... and then check to make sure whether or not or how much your rights were whittled down a little.

Okay, get it? Class dismissed now? You have rights. Use them freely. God wanted you to do so. That's why she made you the way you are. The only thing governments can do is take away rights. Hopefully, in limited fashion.

And don't let uneducated Slashdotters (or, in all likelihood, industry trolls) ever tell you otherwise.

"professor's copyrighted lectures"

[capologist]

Why does a professor have a copyright on his lectures, anyway?

When I was working for a software developer and wrote code, I didn't get a copyright on the code. My employer owns the code the code that I wrote.

The same way my employer paid me to create code, the school pays the professor to create and deliver lectures.

If anybody owns a copyright on those lectures, shouldn't it be the school?

Re:Rights to shakespear

[Anonymous Coward]

Shakespeare's ghost does. Under new copyright laws, copyright is the creator's life + 50 years + creator's afterlife.

"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.