Slashdot Mirror
Who Owns College Students' Notes?
hotfries writes "The Business Journal serving San Jose has an article about Study 24-7, a company that pays students to post their college notes to a national web site. This has raised concerns at UCLA, who argue that the practice violates the intellectual property rights of their professors. "
I have come to realize that being a "geek", if that is what the people here call themselves, has little to do with actually loving knowledge, or even having any.
I don't know if it's just that I'm particularly dense, but I *cannot* take notes and think at the same time. Some of my lecturers take the sensible step of giving out photocopied notes, in which case I can concentrate on the lecture and get a great deal out of it. But if I'm concentrating on deciphering some professor's light grey 11-point scrawl on a mid-grey blackboard across the room, then I don't have time to process any of the information. (I guess this applies more to scientific lectures, where it's important to get every symbol down.)
One of my physics teachers used to stop people from taking notes while he was speaking. "We're thinking now, not writing," he'd say. That, IMO, is the right approach.
Does anybody else find this, or do people learn to multitask?
Pont
The objection, I am sure, lies primarily in the fact that the individual is not allowed to profit from his own ideas But the professor is profiting from his ideas, as is his right. It's called his employment as a professor. In addition, at UCLA they sell professor-approved lecture notes. I would argue that the students also have the right to profit from *their* work, the notes they took.
...and what of the "poor" engineer who is employeed in Silicon valley, that is forced to sign an NDA (et. al)? He, too, is gainfully employeed. It is called a job; not so different.
My concern with verbatim notes being profitably distributed over the internet is that they might force the professor to dumb down his notes--choosing instead to wait until he can publish, copyright, or patent his work. I know some of my professors have discussed various theories of theirs...to be folded into their next publication...
After that, the schools will sue any company that doesn't sign a license agreement before hiring one their graduates.
Just wait, you'll see.
So UCLA is still in a twit over this?
... only they used those new-fangled Xerox machines to copy the notes.
... & entrepreneurs to cater to one or the other.
I was a student there in the late 1960's & there was a class notes company with the same business plan
I had one prof who got really bent out of shape because of someone else's copyright on his words. And I had another who encouraged us to buy the notes so that we could concentrate on the lecture, & not on taking notes. But most of the instructors didn't seem too concerned one way or the other.
Aside from making me feel all young & tingley again, I don't imagine this go around will resolve anything. There will always be intellectually constipated profs & intellectually lazy students
--- PDH
> Student-written notes (as in the Cornell University fiasco) should be copyright the student.
. bs.html
Any fiasco in particular? There's a commercial note-taking service called TakeNote; I think they have a partnership with our campus store, because there's a TakeNote kiosk in the store.
Or are you referring to the Intel fiasco? For those of you not familiar, out-of-order execution (or something related to it) was invented here at Cornell. One of the EE prof's, H.C. Torng (a bitter, bitter prof) discussed the idea in lecture in one of his classes. One of his students went to Intel and took Torng's (original) idea with him. Who's IP was it? The student's, or the prof's?
Intel used this information without permission of the prof--and made LOTS of money. Only afterwards did they acknowledge the source of this new technology.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/science/Dec97/Torng
Interesting. They're not only reprinting copyrighted material, but to get you to help, they're practicing law without a license :)
hawk, esq.
I have to say that is the first time I've ever seen an ESPN reference on Slashdot...
:)
I think it's Bristol University, too
Some have more to gripe about than others. Most of the proffesors that I know take great care to put their own insight into lectures, even when they follow a text. Their notes are origninal, and some are planning to write textbooks from those notes. Money is not the motivator there. It takes years of teaching to get it right and I've never heard of someone getting rich this way. I can understand them being offended by some third party copy machine monkey trying to make a living off their work. Even more irritating is the lack of editorial control and misrepresentation. How is the monkey going to know who's notes are right? No reffernces and no original content is plagerism. All publishers, no matter how small should be held to the same standards, and you should not settle for second best.
I've never bought a set of notes, and I never will. Good notes can be seen in the files of most proffesional societies, but their value is generally in the taking. My peers have usually been more help live than on dead trees. Get together with your friends and learn.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The fact that we actually have to argue cases like this means that the law is fundamentally broken.
It's not the specific case that's important, it's the fact that it _may exist_ at all.
I don't know of any professors that lecture off the cuff. All the profs I had in college already had written down the notes that they were going to lecture from. So, in essence the lecture is already in fixed form. Also, so are the textbooks that are used in the class. They may not belong to the college, but they are copyrighted. It makes me wonder if doing the problems in say a math book, is in violation of copyright. Some texts already have the answers in the back. I think the university is still wrong, just not for the reasons you state.
Remove the '_nospam' from my email address....
I heard about this the other day... and failed to understand the sudden interest.
.com at the end you have a million dollars and are worthwhile to sue, as opposed to addressing the fact that it's an existing problem?
This is, once again, nothing new. There are paid note-takers at every major college in the nation, and class notes for sale. In fact, I recall over 4 years ago reading articles about Stanford, grade inflation, and the place that notes-for-sale play in that. Why is it that every time a long-established practice hits the 'net, it becomes suddently interesting again? Does the whole world just assume that if you own a domain with
I won't even comment on the state of the educational system, it's offtopic, and I'd likely go on for 10 pages. =P
Something may be worth a mention is that the professors are paid to impart their intellectual property to the students. The students pay a tuition to purchase the intellectual property of the University or college employees. Once the tuition is paid and the professor is assigned the task of teaching, the transaction is complete.
In the same respects, a student does not receive a refund for failing a course because the professor failed to provide his part of the bargain. In addition, when the student uses his knowledge gained in the classroom at a job, he does not pay the professor royalty for the intellectual property.
If the professor provided a free service and it was used to make a profit, that would be an issue. But as far as the intellectual property goes, it is a business contract to which the professor has no say in to what the final product's destination should be.
First, this argument helps clarify things like the Lyrics Server. Many argued that people posting lyrics were just posting their interpretation of them. However, if the lyrics were copyrighted by the writer (and/or owned by the band, record label, etc.), then posting the lyrics would be a violation of the copyright, according to the argument in the previous post.
Second, what would the determination be if a student copied something that the prof. wrote on a whiteboard? What if the student drew a diagram that was drawn by the prof? Just curious.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You are quoting part of a saying which goes:
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, become administrators.
Nice try, but still not right.
It is true that copyright law requires fixation, but I seriously doubt that many college lecturers would have any trouble meeting the (low) hurdle that the law requires. Even temporary storage in computer RAM has been sufficient to meet the fixation requirement. In almost any lecture situation, the lecturer has a prepared syllabus, lecture notes, possibly slides, and blackboards. (In intro physics courses at Princeton, we even photographed all of the blackboards.) All of these enjoy copyright protection. The analogy to MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech is flawed on two levels: the specific federal court ruling said that despite the fact that copyright was originally granted on the speech, copyright was lost only when MLK actively promoted wide use of the speech without restrictions -- and in any case the federal appeals court ruled last week that the district court had erred and returned the case for further consideration (ap story).
Fair use laws, it would seem, give a student a right to make even verbatim copies of a lecture for their own educational use. But though IANAL, I would be very surprised if the courts don't find the commercial distribution of such a clearly derivative work as detailed lecture notes to be a violation of copyright.
How incredibly silly. Does that mean that UCLA is willing to take responsibility for the notes on the website if they are incorrect as well?
Ooops, spelling error: s/substancial/substantial
....this is one thing I hate about the slashdot moderation system. The knee-jerkish reactions (though not horribly written) get moderated quickly to the top(+4/5), while worthwhile comments (other perspective) languish at the bottom, and remain largely unread/moderated/commented.
i think its cool, my friend jason currently posts every lecture on 3 different sites, and currently make 500+ a month, no joke.... its all good
I'm really glad my neurons defrag every night when I am asleep, because otherwise all the builds I've been checking out lately would really be fragmenting the filesystem in my head.
:-O)
Is there a definition for this process? Empirical evidence suggests this is the case (Stay awake for six days and wait for the hallucinations, loss of memory and general whackiness) but is such a thing defined anywhere. I was reading somewhere that sleep also allows the brain to cool off (thinking causes excessive heat, notice the smoke
Just curious if anybody has ever seriously studied this stuff.
+&x
I think his sig is meant sarcastically...
Where's the "parsin" in your mene, mene, tekel? If higher education wasn't so expensive and the financial rewards so great, reading others' notes wouldn't be such a big deal. I hope somebody somewhere in the world logs into that site and can use the information for actual learning rather than for just jumping through the end of the semester hoops. Pretty soon, all higher education will be commericialized and served up like stale suburbia. All liberal education class resemble talk shows anyway. What's the big deal in borrowing someone's VCR tape?
Why should teachers be rewarded this way? This makes zero sense to me. Good teachers should be (and frequently are) rewarded with promotions, raises, and recognition from their departments and colleges. Good teachers who are also good writers should be (and frequently are) rewarded with deals with publishing houses to publish books that they write. Why do good teachers need to exercise power over what others can do with ideas learned in that teacher's classroom? For that matter, what teacher worth the title would want to restrict the spread of his knowledge? Isn't that what teaching is all about, disseminating learning?
There isn't really even an argument from the standpoint of job security. Note taking services are not going to put college professors out of business, ever. If nothing else, the priviledge of asking questions and interacting with the professor directly can never be replaced by photocopied notes. My question is, who is being harmed by these notetaking services? The answer is nobody, as far as I can see (unless you count the students foolish enough to think they can substitute buying notes for attending class, but that's a different matter).
-r
What exactly does this mean? Should the professors be out there helping you and your HTML coding friends start eSuckMyCock.com? That won't happen, since they are busy doing the research that will put food on your table in decades to come. Maybe they should stop. You don't deserve it, you piece of shit.
Please keep in mind the UCLA is a public institution of higher learning, with the goal to educate, not hoard information.
The taxpayers and students are paying money to receive an education. They do not sign non-disclosure agreements regarding their notes or the professors lectures. Perhaps, as others have noted on this discussion, that the universities or professors are concerned that they will be embarrassed by the contents of the notes, which may reflect poorly on the professor and the university. These professors already undergo peer-review, and integral part of the university process, so I'm not sure why they should or could be ashamed of their lectures.
Also you made a comments which I would like to directly reply to:
You claim that college professors are the most "out of touch" people on the face of the earth. Can you "prove" they're even out of touch--let alone one of the most "out of touch" groups?"
Read through this discussion. You'll find alot of us who have at least 4 years or more of experience dealing with professors. Some people I've spoken directly with feel they're definitely out of touch with their surrounding communities, calling the university a country-club for socialists. Personal political beliefs may impact your beliefs here though.
You also ask:"What law says students can do whatever they want with their notes?"
More likely, a better question would be, which you allude to is, what law or laws prevents them from distributing their notes?
Just to make things ironic I will now post this notice informing all journalists that I must be contacted first to be qouted outside of this Slashdot discussion.
This is the worst site I've ever seen. I almost hit the reset button on my computer because the java crap froze it for so long. I tried a few easy searches and couldn't find any notes. Oh, and the Brain Games thing is a huge animation that essentially just says 'coming soon'.
See that "Preview" button?
200 years ago, human property (slavery) was considered normal.
Today, it is unthinkable.
Perhaps in another 200 years, we'll feel the same way about intellectual property.
Perhaps. Of course, that would mean that we had turned the intellectuals into slaves and expropriated their property.
College Professor, as a group, just might be the most out of touch people on the face on the earth. The kids can do whatever they want with their notes.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
You could publish some short excerpts from the book and call it fair use. This is fairly common both in reviewing books and movies and also in news services like slashdot and lwn.net. Figuring out where the line is can be difficult for University Students, especially American ones who've only had the mediocre school system to guide them until they get to college.
For a math class, substituting your own problems for the ones the professor does on the board would be a good idea not only from the potential legal perspective but also to determine if you really know how to do that class of problem. For a physics class, most of the forumlae that go up on the board have long since been hashed over and were probably copied verbatim from some textbook anyway. Again, if specific problems are being solved your best bet would be to substitute different numbers in a similar equasion.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If they educate me, I own that knowledge, notes and all.
If I speak in a public forum I give away my words to those who hear, I can't claim that I own the words in their heads (unless they're gollems, of course).
Besides, there was a transfer of money (tuition).
Seems rather far-fetched to me. Is there some legal aspect I'm missing?
-- I'm omnipotent, I just don't care.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
At West Virginia University, in my hometown, there's this place called Neer Notes. (The Mountaineer is the mascot of WVU.) They pay students to take two copies of notes in class, and then sell them to other students in the class that may have missed that day or for some reason didn't get the notes. This is perfectly legal, and the place has been around for at least 15 years. It's a private company, I think started by students, but not necessarily run by them now, and the University doesn't care. What's the difference?
The heirs of Dr King have sued for their copyright fees. They just have not won yet. The speech is copyrighted, the performance was copyrighted.
The issue with professor's notes is also covered by prior lawsuits. The question will be the extent to which the notes replicate the presentation. Capturing the information, but not the presentation, lets you avoid copyright issues. But if you capture the presentation also, there are copyright issues. None of the news reports provide enough information to judge whether these notes would violate copyright restrictions.
I rather doubt that this violates intellectual property but it sure is annoying. Some of you who play yahoo chess may know me as sedandawk. I was playing chess there the other day, when someone was using the chat portion of this program to try and recruit students to do something similar to this. Aparently they could make money by supplying their notes, and the person recruiting them to do so would also get money. (sounds a bit like a pyramid scheme) It was an annoying waste of bandwidth to people who were there to play chess, if nothing else.
She's right on both counts. If she's teaching exactly the same class, she's gotten lazy. Even without paid note-takers, your situation will arise too often. Her response was perfect - if your brother was actually learning from your notes, he wouldn't have bombed the test.
Someone put up a website with the homework solutions to current quarters Math, Calc, Chem, and Physics courses at Ohio State. Got all the teachers freaking out. I say good for them. The university should realize that they need to rethink how they use homework as a learning tool, but I don't give them that much credit. Why bother with reform when it's so much easier to keep things the way they are :) http://www.studentwish.com/
I went to UCLA, and let me tell you, I didn't attend half the classes. I brought the notes from ASUCLA, the student body portion of UCLA. The notes were taken by students who got paid for taking notes! The money I paid for the notes went to ASUCLA. The professors didn't get a dime out of the deal. I think this is just one of those attempts to prevent the loss of income by ASUCLA. If you ever attended UCLA, you know what I'm talking about. Overpriced books, UCLA branded merchandise that cost half at other universities, and food that cost more than McDonald's made from stuff you would get in the army. I doubt this is a case about intellectual property as much as it is a case about ASUCLA losing money from students buying their notes online.
He disallowed taping as well (which is understandable although unfortunate for some students).
It's their own work!!!
I believe academia does serve a certain function in society. However, this most of this "research" stuff is pretty pointless. Would you mind explaining to me how a PhD. in the liberal arts (e.g.: philosophy, english, management, theology, etc) really advances the human condition? They spend half their time in this little incestuous circle-jerk, doing critiques of critiques of critiques (and the like). How many PhD. do you really know that are producing work (e.g.: a book, or something of value) to be consumed by something other than academics? If they really produced something that people really used, even in something which I regard to be pointless, such as philosophy, I don't have a problem with it.
Futhermore, even in the more "worthwhile" pursuits, the system is geared such that they spin their wheels an aweful lot, many words but little progress. This in turn causes a lot of infighting--the politics in academica is brutal.
Even in the sciences professors are on a different planet. If you believe that they're creating our economy, you are a fool. A rare few may start something, but they hardly ever finish it or develop a product. A lucky few have their work licensed by a real company or individual...
Most of my teacher's notes are from my textbooks anyways, so I dont really see why my teacher has any special rights to my notes.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I'm currently going for my Masters and it's interesting that my current class, we all had to sign a Non-disclosure agreement. The notes that we are given are copyrighted. But all the notes are posted on my professors web site anyway!?, so actually anyone can get them. My professor really doesn't care, but he also included notes from other professors, in which is the reason why we had to sign. He talks basically straight from his notes that are view with a overhead. So, I can't legally sell my notes. Well, since I get the notes, I just write stuff in my own interpretation to help me understand it a little better. But my interpretation won't be useful with out the given notes.
I did figure out how Hue is derived from RGB, which I may post on my web site soon. But that was done because I couldn't find it anywhere else. I don't mean just the formula, but how that formula came about.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Copyright may protect the text of a lecture itself, but no way does it prevent a student from expressing the content of a lecture in his or her own way. And I don't see how a restriction that class notes are not to be used for profit can possibly be upheld - after all, I might be taking that class so I can get a profitable job using what I learned...and I might just refer back to those class notes.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Actually those kids that have to study might do quite well. Just think... they already are used to doing work and studying hard. In college it will be no different, they will just have to study harder.
People like you on the other hand who don't have to work to get good grades in high school will suddenly find that they now must study, pull all nighters, etc. just to keep their head above water. I hope you are prepared for it. Having taught many freshman I can tell you that unless you are truly exceptional, you may be in for quite a shock. Keep up your study skills throughout high school because they will be a necessity in college.
My high school was one of the top schools in California and while I breezed by high school and even my first two years of college at one of the top three electrical engineering schools, if you don't have good study skills and work ethic, it will catch up to you. Honestly, college isn't that bad but if you go into it thinking you're the sh*t, you will find yourself sorely mistaken.
This is total BS. Americans are so concerned about intelectual property, that often they chose to stop the free exchange of ideas rather than encourage it. The web has historically been a free place. Now they are trying to limit this freedom. As long as the name of the professor is mentioned in the class notes, it should be perfectly ok to post them anywhere you want.
the article keeps saying "the professors" this and "the professors" that but never actually cites or quotes any specific professor.
so my question is: is it really the professors who are upset about this or is it just the administrators?
most of the profs i've ever dealt with wouldn't have really had any problem with notes for their classes being available online (although they may take offense to the sites that charge money). many even make class notes available freely themselves. having the notes online in no way damages a professor's professional reputation or hireability.
as i see it, this sort of thing doesn't really infringe on the professors' rights as much as it interferes with the colleges' revenue stream.
/anders
Smokey the Bear says, "Strip mining prevents forest fires!"
On the other hand, if the notes contained information that was the IP of a professor, then they would not be entirey the property of the student. Actually the notes would be the students property, but the information contained therein would not.
Sheesh.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
- it makes those exams questions change, so the situation you had won't arise as all the staff know we have the previous papers.
- some professors have this insidious habit of giving lectures of one subject and an exam on something that you can never know by attending lectures - this system gives them out.
Not to say I haven't passed some courses rather easily because the prof was lazy making new exams. But generally that won't work so memorising isn't really worth while.
--
Pirkka
The ownership isn't the point. I own all the books on my bookshelves, but that doesn't grant me to publish the text of those books on a web site.
The question is, who owns the copyright?
-- Abigail
It's somewhat off-topic, but I have always wondered why lectures by great professors are not videotaped and distributed to the public for a small duplication charge. This would be helpful to students and anyone interested in learning something about a subject. These lectures are currently available only to those who are students in the right program at a particular college or university. This excludes the vast majority of the public.
Employee's of the STATE or FEDERAL goverment canNOT copyright material they create in the context of there job. This includes anybody who works at public/state schools.
Copyright law protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. In this distinction, copyrights differ from patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, all of which protect the idea itself.
Thus, for example, I can steal the ideas from "I Have a Dream" and use them in a speech of my own. But if I were to use MLK's exact words (or a substantial portion of them) I would be guilty of violating his copyright -- if his heirs chose to assert and enforce it.
How many note-taking students do not regulary copy verbatim what a professor writes on a blackboard?
-- Abigail
Come on open-sourcers ;) You pay to go to college because classes facilitate the learning process. The information is not proprietary. I could go to the library, and with a good amount of research and organization, get the vast majority of information that one learns in college for free. What you're paying for at college is the presentation (and the degree of course) - and all this website is offering is the raw info.
By your "logic" all works are derivative.
Remember IP rights is a right by law not a "God given right" that why you can challenge this sort of stuff incourt.
I hope someday you have a really good idea that you could use to make enough money to retire on, only to have some big company take it away from you, then we'll see how you feel about IP.
You are for some reason telling us that Jazz musicians can't copyright their improvised solos.
I for some reason find that rather ridiculous.
I agree, what you then compose is your own work, and you probably own the copyright on it. What you are doing is journalism.
I can still imagine professors having a problem with this. We all know what bad journalism can do (how often does slashdot see a discussion triggered by bad journalism?). What if you do your best, write nice, coherent, logically structured groups of thoughts, and it's just plain wrong? Or it comes out as if the professor made a difficult and hard to understand lecture, while (s)he didn't? Suppose a professor gave a nice lecture, but there was a bad note taker, posting her notes on a website, suggesting the professor didn't know his stuff real well. Can the professor and/or university take action? Who's going to pay for that? Should professors be afraid that bad note takers in their classes give them an undeserved bad reputation?
-- Abigail
OTOH, you make some very good points. I feel that this topic is definitely going to end up in court. Perhaps making it's way to appeals, and eventually to, gasp, the Supreme Court. If not, then there is probably some similar case that defines the legal boundaries of this subject.
Unlike the above Anonymous Coward, I got away with not studying through most of college even as a CS major at a top-10 (USNWP ranking) university.
That situation wasn't sustainable and by the time I got to my senior year where I needed to know how to study, I didn't know how. I didn't know at all.
In the end, I left (for other reasons) with a semester still to go. It was strange because I knew the information enough to tutor my classmates but not well enough for the exams.
I sure as hell don't, but I realize that the valididy of that statement might as well be zero. Um, I *do* know that it is quite hard to write as fast as a professor talks, and copying straight from a black board won't let you make up lost time :o)
Shawn Poulsen (Fruan)
"On Slashdot, many obvious things are insightful." - Annonymous Coward, 2000/7/9
Anybody who doesn't like IP rights, has never had a good idea.TM
> Who would care about CS101 notes, since they're pretty much the same world wide?
The professor who teaches the course may care very much, if he/she feels that new technology may -replace- him/her as a teacher. There is a deep-rooted fear among a -lot- of faculty members that universities will eventually use Internet-based instruction to reduce or eliminate professors altogether. The idea runs like this:
(a) The university hires an adjunct professor to teach a class and generate Web-based lectures.
(b) The adjunct signs over his/her IP rights to the course material as a condition of employment.
(c) The university dismisses the professor, and offers the course every semester thereafter using a TA to hold office hours and give exams.
I am a faculty member myself, and I have heard these comments from my colleagues repeatedly. Nor do I doubt some college administrators would do it to cut costs, if they thought they could get away with it. Students have always had the ability to photocopy course notes and give them to other students, but a photocopier can't teach a class, so IP concerns were never a big issue in the past. However, the perception nowadays is that Internet-based multimedia lectures -can- replace a live professor, at least for some courses. The entire issue of IP ownership of course notes is simply a pre-emptive move on the part of faculty members to prevent this scenario from taking place.
Not that it will help, in the long run. If Moore's Law stays on track, I fully expect to see AI-based tutors taking the place of live instructors for many undergraduate courses in the next 20 to 30 years. Universities will embrace the innovation as a cost-cutting measure but will themselves be swept away by the revolution in teaching. Professors and universities alike are unwilling and unable to grasp how much the business of education is going to change in the next two decades.
Universities are usually not public places. You might be able to sneak in in some lectures if the class is big, but in general you cannot attend lectures unless you're a student or have some other agreement with the university.
Furthermore, I don't think you can tape a ball game, and then show it to a large audience, making money from the commercials you throw in.
-- Abigail
Nevertheless, I have to wonder about the UCLA suit. As I said in another post, copyright law protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. At least in the classes I teach, I don't think the student notes are a very close copy of how I sometimes express myself. (I hope, anyway, that last week nobody wrote it down when I digressed from the subject by lying down on the floor and kicking and screaming!)
If I want to make money by selling class notes, I am certainly capable of creating such a collection. Since I choose not to, if one of my students wants to do the work, why shouldn't they profit?
The whole thing strikes me as a dog-in-the-manger attitude: "I don't have the energy to make extra money by providing you with really good notes written by the professor, so I don't want anybody else to get that money either." Sheesh.
As I recall, one of the requirements for a successful copyright lawsuit is economic harm. It's hard to see where the economic harm would arise, other than with respect to UCLA's own lecture notes (which they deny taking into consideration, and which weren't copied verbatim in any case).
subject says it all...
UCLA is right in this one (legally at least, though not ethically), but not for the reasons they bring up in the article. Upon enrollment, all students of the University of California (including UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, which I attended) are required to sign a contract which states that, among other things, all writings produced by the student during the period of enrollment are the property of the UC Regents. I'm sure this would cover lecture notes as well as term papers, exams, dissertations, etc.
:-)
I had some serious problems with signing this contract, but gave in. I guess its moot, though, because I didn't really produce anything worth owning in those four years
I suppose I should make the standard IANAL disclamer.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
The real problem is that alot of /.ers are anti-university in general and they feel threatened by the "ivory tower". Indeed you and I are probably exceptions but I have very high regard for most professors. I happened to go to a university very well known for high quality research yet all my professors were excellent resources for the students and were genuinely interested in helping the students learn the class material.
Ah, the oft-quoted "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Too bad it's a misinterpretation. The original intention was a reflection of the reality of aging: "Those who still can, do; those who no longer can, teach."
If I want to profit from my interpretation of knowledge that professors have imparted to me (And good notes will almost always be in the student's own words) and some company wanted to pay me for that, well then I would be gainfully employed, wouldn't I?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
>You don't know anything.
Duh who am I?
>Who was it that made the current technological
>revolution possible?
Ross Jeffries?
>College professors.
You mean like the one I caught copying an entire paragraph out of a textbook and claiming it was his own writing or the guy in the NAS who threatened to ruin my career because my data contradicted his NYTimes front page research? I guess you're right though. If it weren't for people like that, I'd probably still be a post-doc in academia rather than at a lucrative Silicon Valley startup.
>Anyone who thinks that the best and the
>brightest go into industry and "do" is living in >a hole in the ground
You're right. Some of the worst managers I've ever dealt with were prof hacks who failed the tenure test.
>The majority of college professors, at least in
>the large universities are primarily researchers
Who spend so much time scrambling for grant money, excreting out Lowest Publishable Units, and misrepresenting/cooking their data that they have little time to teach.
>who, in fact, often found companies
unwilling to hire them.
>if they feel
lucky.
>it wouldn't interfere with their more important >work.
Which of course is maintaining a sweat shop of post-docs, grad students, and interns.
Um... HELLO? "Professors", supposedly-intelligent-people....
*** I *** own my thoughts, YOU do *** NOT ***.
And if I write them down and sell them, tough cookies for you, boy. You should have been an author instead of a professor.
mindslip
Thank you...I was hoping somebody would think of that. now mind you, it becomes "Fixed Form" if a recording is made of it, but general IP rights (and several legal cases) put that even if the recording was not produced under the consent or knowledge of the performer, the material recorded IS the performers property (although the "tape" is not).
The performer may not (legally) be able to stop sales of it, but the sales are illegal if the performer is not adequately compensated. The alternative is calling it a bootleg. The RIAA has had laws passed that the sale can become illegal if the performer has an exclusive contract with the record company that normally distributes his work.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
There is a massive difference between "giving copies of my class notes to friends and posting them on the web." This is especially true if you are posting them--for profit--to a web site that is itself geared toward making profits from advertising. I know that, as a professor, I do not want notes taken during my lectures to appear alongside ads for Budweiser. (I do not object to the idea of having such notes posted to a non-profit web site--though, in that case, I would want to be given the chance to review and correct the notes.)
As a more concrete example, consider one class I had in graduate school. The professor had wonderful notes, meticulously laid out with section and equation numbers. He put everything on the board and left plenty of time for the students to copy everything. One day I missed class, so I copied the notes from a classmate. I was stunned to realize that the notes I got from him were nearly incomprehensible. Not that he didn't take faithful notes, mind you, but the notes were not filtered through my own learning process. Looking back over the notes I had taken in previous lectures I found that I did not copy down verbatim the teacher's words, nor even what the teacher put on the board. I underlined or made marginal notes whenever something struck me as particularly important or confusing; I left out things that seemed trivial or obvious, and so on. Paid note takers do the same thing; they have to because the service generally imposes a standard format for all of its notes.
Naturally, the situation is different for handouts. It would be inappropriate to include duplicates of the instructor's handouts in notes that are offered for sale because the handouts would necessarily be copies of the instructor's notes, without any additional interpretation. I still don't think I would object if it were my notes; since I give the same handouts out freely to all the students I don't particularly mind if they pay to get them from another source. However, I can see how such a policy might lend itself to abuse, so I can't fault an instructor who chooses a more restrictive policy. In any case, I see no problem with noting that handouts were given, and perhaps summarizing the contents.
I also think it is reasonable for a university to object to paid note takers sitting in on the classes without being enrolled. Once again, I personally always used an open-door policy in my classes, as did most instructors I knew; my feeling was that anyone who wanted to learn more about astronomy was welcome in my classroom. However, I think there is a legitimate argument that if a company wants to make money off of an instructor's lectures then at least their note taker ought to be paying for a seat in the class, just like the rest of the students. (NB: so far as I know the note taking service that operated on the IU campus used only students enrolled in the classes they were taking notes for.)
Finally, on a more philosophical note (that's a code phrase for ``rant coming up''), I am appalled by universities' recent trend toward viewing the university as a ``business'', and education as a ``product''. The university is supposed to be a repository of knowledge held in common for the good of everyone and a place where new knowledge is created, again, for the good of everyone. Indeed, I believe that ideal is why we use tax money to fund public universities, and why private universities get special tax status. To see universities as institutions throw that ideal out the window in the quest for the almighty buck is bad enough. To see people who call themselves scholars and educators follow suit is positively sickening. If you want to get rich so badly, by all means, head out into the business world and do your best. I wish you all the luck in the world. But let's save the universities for the mission of storing, disseminating, and extending human knowledge. It's what they were meant for, and it's what they are good at.
-r
One concept that the courts will get around to sometime in the distant future is that once you start telling others your "IP", it becomes public domain. Its like so many songs that were in the lyric database -- people entered that data from memory which seems to be a good case that the information is "in the public domain."
Would you hire a student that signed a non-disclosure about what they were supposed to learn in school? What good is a student if they can't use the info that a degree is supposed to imply thye have?
A number of posters have suggested that most professors just regurgitate information that's in the public domain anyway. That's at least partly true when the professor hasn't done original research in the specific area covered by the class--that is, most of the time. Yet professors work hard to shape the material (trying to keep kids awake) and to come up with punchy, memorable formulations to help students retain the material. Students often write these formulations down verbatim. I don't think there's much doubt that such material is covered by copyright. Sorry, you don't acquire rights to material by transmuting it from one medium into another; and despite what a few people have claimed here, the student's payment of tuition does not purchase intellectual property rights over the material taught.
When the professor is presenting original research, as often happens in upper-level classes, especially graduate classes, the claim for copyright is even stronger. One of the great foundational texts of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, was published posthumously from notes taken in his courses by some of his students (carefully cross-checked and edited). I'm so glad they didn't consider those notes their property, but instead published them under the professor's name.
I read many of these replies and I have to say that I'm amazed. Literally.
While I do not generally support the idea that knowledge is the property of any one person, each individual does have rights to protect and profit from their hard work.
If I were to create a program that monitored /. and stripped out all the banner ads and placed mine in it's place and called it 'dotslash' would it be OK? I'm guessing not.
But it's knowledge... - I don't buy it. The ./ folks have a right not to have their hard work undermined and undervalued by simple rip-offs. If I take a book and copy it page for page that's clearly illegal. How about if I take a book, read a paragraph, write a "new" paragraph in a "new" book - is that also illegal?
Maybe not, but you can certainly see that there's a line between the normal educational process and wholesale rip-off of intellectual property.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough people that want to find the middle ground anymore. I can't support either side in the argument because they fail to see the other's point of view.
After spending 6+ years as an undergrad, I have learned that all my rights end the moment I fork over the $1k+ for in-state tuition. A quick off the cuff list... a) the student phonebook is not printed until the end of october, middle of november. Yet any company can purchase a complete list of my phone number, major, years in school, where i'm from, my family, and any other information I have had to fork over that wasn't explicity exempted. Not only this but they (the university) will pre order and filter it so you can better target your core markets. b) the football band was recently uprooted from their longtime place on the field so that several coporate pavallions could be erected. The band was of course moved into part of the student seating area. We get deaf while the other side of the stadium can't hear the band. c)we can't have the longest running/largest student run celebration unless we agree to every one of the administrations demands. (any guesses of where I go to school yet?) d)grads and faculity are moved around between buildings just like a chess match. "We need this building to appear accupied, how bout you move in during midterms." e)as with any adminstration, decesions come from the highest places and are justified with the tag line "this is what students want" f)departments are constantly dying and only get budget demands if they are currently generating PR for the university. Whenever and alumni decides to give a large cash infusion to Deaprtment X to stop budget death, suddenly the admistration cries how it will make the Department X the best damn X in the country, till 5 years later when they leach it into other departments and the cycle starts over. g)when working for a department you have to sign several legal documents to the effect anything you discover/create is the University's. You do not recieve any royalities unless you are a prof. here are several "at the same times" h)At the same time they talk about safety on campus they gut several of the safety department budgets. i)At the same time they complain about the profs not spending enough time in classrooms teaching they complain about the profs not spending enough tim in the labs researching As I can see I'm degenerating into a rant as as this is AC and will probly not be moderated up, I'll quit. But do remember, the University loves your income, oh, I mean you. "Looking over my shoulder at the Moon, there in the heights a swoosh apon her face, and golden arches glimmering twain Venus and Mars. I then new I had failed"
Some of us really do put a lot of work into our courses, and, while it is a nice ego-boo to hear that students elsewhere may use our materials to help themselves learn, it would annoy me greatly to learn that someone may be making money off notes that I made (or verbatim copies).
For an example of the material I put online for my students (before each lecture), see stupendous.rit.edu/classes/p hys212/phys212.html
I think that if someone approached me about using notes derived from my lectures, I'd be happy to work with him -- perhaps we could improve the quality if we worked together. Perhaps it boils down to an issue of courtesy.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
After spending 6+ years as an undergrad, I have learned that all my rights end the moment I fork over the $1k+ for in-state tuition. A quick off the cuff list...
a) the student phonebook is not printed until the end of october, middle of november. Yet any company can purchase a complete list of my phone number, major, years in school, where i'm from, my family, and any other information I have had to fork over that wasn't explicity exempted. Not only this but they (the university) will pre order and filter it so you can better target your core markets.
b) the football band was recently uprooted from their longtime place on the field so that several coporate pavallions could be erected. The band was of course moved into part of the student seating area. We get deaf while the other side of the stadium can't hear the band.
c)we can't have the longest running/largest student run celebration unless we agree to every one of the administrations demands. (any guesses of where I go to school yet?)
d)grads and faculity are moved around between buildings just like a chess match. "We need this building to appear accupied, how bout you move in during midterms."
e)as with any adminstration, decesions come from the highest places and are justified with the tag line "this is what students want"
f)departments are constantly dying and only get budget demands if they are currently generating PR for the university. Whenever and alumni decides to give a large cash infusion to Deaprtment X to stop budget death, suddenly the admistration cries how it will make the Department X the best damn X in the country, till 5 years later when they leach it into other departments and the cycle starts over.
g)when working for a department you have to sign several legal documents to the effect anything you discover/create is the University's. You do not recieve any royalities unless you are a prof.
here are several "at the same times"
h)At the same time they talk about safety on campus they gut several of the safety department budgets.
i)At the same time they complain about the profs not spending enough time in classrooms teaching they complain about the profs not spending enough tim in the labs researching
As I can see I'm degenerating into a rant as as this is AC and will probly not be moderated up, I'll quit. But do remember, the University loves your income, oh, I mean you.
"Looking over my shoulder at the Moon, there in the heights a swoosh apon her face, and golden arches glimmering twain Venus and Mars. I then new I had failed"
So you feel that ending human slavery meant turning former slave owners into slaves and expropriating their valuable field-working property?
IP makes me sick.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
I think it has already been decided, in another context, that the IP rights for lectures are owned by the professor and not by the university.
On my bookshelf I have a well thumbed copy of "Nabokov's Lectures on Literature" which consists of lectures delivered at Cornell in the 1950s. The copyright notice says that they are the property of VN, not of the Cornell regents.
Aren't these collections of lectures pretty common? I think there are even audio books and video tapes you can buy of famous professors lecturing (the Richard Feynman audio tapes on physics are an example). I don't remember ever hearing that any of these were licensed from or were the property of the university
As far as the notes go, I think they would fall under fair use. After all, taking notes to write a book review or synopsis is not infringing on anyone's copyright.
it depends. It would be nice if we could say they always belong to the prof or the student - but things are never so simple. It really depends on the content and how the notes were taken. If the prof is just teaching lower division material then she/he is not presenting any new information and is probably in fact teaching out of several books. How then can the prof claim IP? The only case I can see for this is if the student copyied what was said word for word - and even then this is iffy. On the other hand, if the prof is sharing new ideas (ie results of years of research, etc) then I would say there is a much better case for IP.
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
Plagerism is the lowest accademic dishonesty. When commited in ignornace, it's just rude. Erudition is what the University is for. When commited by someone who knows better it's a crime, and that is what lawsuits are for. These note farms are a screw for all involved.
I know proffessor who have spent years getting their notes right, and I can understand them being angry at plagerism. These folks are doing it for love and glory. There's not much money in text book writing, even less in publishing articles, and less than that in lectures. Proffessors deserve credit for and editorial control of their work. They don't get that from the copy machine monkey down the street, who's trying to make a living off this kind of thing. Who's notes are right? The monkey has no idea. A good lecture is a fine thing, have some respect for your proffesor.
Anyhow, who needs to buy notes? You can get good notes from the files of most proffesional societies for free if you need them. Mostly, my peers and texts have been much more helpful. Get together with your friends and enjoy learning and problem solving. This is much better than carefully formating your notes for a not so quick buck. Sharing really is better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I am instructing a cs course in some college. I don't care much about my intellectual property, but there are a few important problems with having copies of notes being distributed.
Last year, I was grading a student's homework, and he was just acing all questions. Even better, not only he was giving the right answer, but he was presenting the answer like I would have done it myself. I was very happy of this, until I realized that his answers were a perfect copy of the solutions to homeworks I distributed a few semesters before! I met with the student, and he argued that he merely used my answers to "understand better the questions" and that he would - of course - never cheat for a homework.
This kind of situation is very annoying. Some may say that I shouldn't ask the same homework questions twice, but good questions which are not too hard are difficult to come up with. So yes, if I could control the distributions of my solutions by claiming intellectual property on them, that might help limit the damage.
Except for that, it is true that I don't like the idea of having a company making money of my work. I wouldn't mind for class notes, because those might be useful for the students, but I do mind for homework solutions, because I believe those are harmful to the student's learning experience. If a student doesn't struggle to find a solution, he doesn't learn.
-- Slef.
-- Slef
The place for honing the skills of effective learning is in college, not when the allagators are snapping at your delicate hind parts.
It's truly in the best self-interest of students to develop research and learning skills, honed to a fine edge, while they're in college. The sooner you learn something, the easier life is. Trust me on this!
You won't get your hand held when you attend a developer's conference, and the tuition can be pretty steep (as a consultant, you do the paying).
Neither mentors nor co-workers will give you all their tricks and knowledge on a silver platter.
Don't expect obeisance in your "Holiness'" presence unless you're DAMN smart. Dollars and doughnuts says really smart cookies probably take better notes than others...
If you're really going to make a mark in the *real* world, it's lots of hard work. There is *no* free lunch.
Also, fat chance publishing a book or tech journal article without background references and credits that will be worth the paper it's written on.
'Nuff said.
You need to refer to machaone's previous replies to some of my comments regarding "proof"--only then you will understand.
5 218&threshold=0&commentsort=3&mode=thread& pid=63#146
That being said, I do believe most professors are out of touch. I have had 4 years (and more to come) at university already. The point I was making is that machaone has no "proof" (see above).
Regarding UCLA being a public institution, this strikes me as a bit of a paradox (if you follow the same motif as the rest of slashdot). How can you rant and rage about the evil's of non-disclosure agreements/non-compete, yet proclaim that professors have no rights to their own work. The objection, I am sure, lies primarily in the fact that the individual is not allowed to profit from his own ideas. If a professor were to improve his lecture (before he publishes), and his work is given away at profit by others, this can have the same effect. In that, you claim the state/university/students own his work, not the professor. Let me remind you that the system of notesharing has worked reasonably throughout history, this new internet business has the potential to create new problems. I'm not willing to just knee-jerk to either extreme, one way or other.
Legally speaking, the copyright law is not so cut and dry. Refer to:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/11/12/16
Here at the University of Kentucky, professors routinely create "course packets" that range anywhere between 5 and 30 dollars/class that supply old notes and exams. Its a great service, but if I can get the same material cheaper, why not. One "technically advanced" professor even had the audacity to take her powerpoint slides for introductory biology, put them in 3*2 layout and sell them for 25 bucks, on top of the $98 textbook. I hear she's now on a grant from macromedia, wonder how much a cd of her flash animations would cost???
Read my plan to save the Bengals
That's right, all 2.5 to 2.0 GPA students' notes are now 40% off! Why pay more if you're not trying for a 4.0? Don't be fooled by promises of higher GPAs, go directly to www.Ijustwannapass.com for all your study needs.
"We're also throwing in a book of doodles free with every order!"
Since when was *anything* you were taught in any school not "common knowledge"? How can this be considered IP?
When you get a copyright, you do not gain rights to an idea, but rather you gain rights to how you describe the idea. How many physics books are there that describe the law of gravity? Every one of then has copyright held by the author.
If this was about research related materials they might have a point. But then again, if it is research, it will likely be published in some
dusty old academic journal anyway.
And that journal will have copyrights held by the author or the journal publisher.
I think that the situation here is very mixed. Many university profs work from manuscripts of textbooks they are preparing. Some use the manuscripts as class notes. Some present slides during class, or rewrite their notes to a blackboard. I think that a good note taker has a very strong chance of actually making a copy of material that is in fact copyright by the professor. Publishing this material on a web site is clearly a violation of the professor's copyright on that material.
Sure, extemporaneous discussion or interpritation by the student is not copyright material. But I bet that a good part of the notes reflect the expression of the idea by the professor which is CERTAINLY at least a derivative work, if not a verbatim copy.
IANAL, but I think the universities are quite clearly correct here when they claim that this sort of thing is in fact a violation of copyright law.
I used to be a student at Penn State, where a company small called Nittany Notes payed students $5 to $7 dollars a day for quality notes. You had to have at least a 3.2 GPA and be registered for the class you took notes in. Nittany Notes is completely private and not related to the university.
:) could walk off the street and buy notes from any class on any day for less than a buck. Nittany Notes sells complete semester note subscriptions and 'exam packs' as well. For all I know, they could be online by now (I did this back in '95).
Back when I was a naive freshman I had no qualms working for the note company. Quite a few of the previous posters have already detailed the reasons _why_ they think it' okay to distribute notes, so I won't reiterate them here.
The faculty generally disliked Nittany Notes because they felt their "intellectual property" was being threatened. Any Joe Schmoe (or Joe Paterno
Nittany Notes' standing policy was that notetakers should NOT under any circumstances reveal themselves to professors. A few professors really _did_ have a bug up their ass about intellectual propery.
Yet, a different professor once remarked "I know one of you is taking notes for that company downtown, please be sure to announce that the quiz scheduled for next thrusday has been postponed...could you please change the previous days' notes to reflect this?"
It goes both ways, I guess. My opinion is: if you don't want people to take your information, don't teach. Duh.
When I went to UCLA the "student association" sold official UCLA-approved class notes. They also went to great lengths to ensure that they were the only viable source for those notes, including the funky paper trick and getting really, really, bent out of shape when some students banded together and tried to sell their own notes. It's a little hard to believe that they aren't just a little bit behind the uproar there.
This type of stuff has been going on at Penn State University for the past (too many to remember) years. There are 2 companies I know of that pay A or B students for their notes and in-turn sell copies of the notes to any student who needs them (if you missed a day.. if you just never go to class..) There are even a few instructors who give their own notes (although not nearly as many). The company I *know* the name of is "Nittany Notes", the other I can't remember. Then two Penn States students started a new "company" (I don't remember how they make their money, but I know you don't pay yourself for the notes), that takes all the notes they can get their hands on and places them (in an orginized fashion by subject/class/section/teacher) on the web. I have not heard of nor seen any outcry for any of the Penn State Professors.. and I believe the biggest reason is because they know what notes are taken are: 1) Not their property since it IS the *students* interpritation of what's been said and what is important 2) Strongly suggested students only use Nittany Notes to help study, that there is nothing saying the notes are totally right, and that the are writtin in a way you'll be able to study from
Admittedly, I haven't read through all 223 comments here and perhaps someone has an answer but -- one thing that really confuses me on professors claiming it's "Their IP" is that in the vast majority of their lectures, my professors are presenting material from a text that they haven't written. Diagrams, charts, the whole bit, ripped straight from the book - ideas pulled right from the text. So when a professor is presenting someone elses material, it's lost on me on how that becomes their IP.
On the same note are classes that tend toward discussion between students as well as the professor. If the students have written some thoughts down before lecture to bring up during class, are they entitled to IP rights on everything they say in class?
It all seems a bit ridiculous. The reality of the two state schools I've attended is that having a video/audio tape or well-done notes is just as good as being at the lecture itself. I think in these large lecture classes colleges and professors like to pretend we're still in some sort of academic setting where ideas flow both ways, when really we're all just sitting around and watching someone talk for an hour. I've found professors who teach classes like this often disturbed, even angered, by people doing well by copying/buying the notes and never attending the class -- not a dilemma about their IP rights and the ethics of having notes sold commercially.
Anyway, my answer to professors upset about commercial noting is: why not structure your class so that commercial notetaking is useless? Give out YOUR notes or lecture outlines (useful in many ways beyond this topic). Or even consider turning your class into a "real" class rather than a a talking puppet show. In a "real" class (and I've unfortunately only been to a few) the idea of commercial notetaking is laughable.
Student Notes are likely copyright by the student AND the professor.
In terms of "transcript of a lecture", it is fairly clear-cut that the professor owns the lecture, and that use of any transcript of the lecture (such as "student notes") must protect the rights of the professor.
However, the student's transcript ("work of art") is owned by the student. Alas, the two can not be easily separated... but I digress.
Therefore, only by agreement may the student or professor sell or otherwise license student notes.
And that is my personal legal opinion on the matter. Your neighborhood legal professional may think differently... check with YOUR lawyer first.
Law or no law, I know I pay way too much for college text books, and way too much per hour of tuition. Anything I take from class I can sell. How can it be intellectual property of the professors, when they are selling it to the students at costs vary from $100 for $500 dollars per credit hour. How is selling the notes different from taking the notes learning them, and later becoming a professor and Getting paid to teach those same notes in your classes. Simple answer its not different. quite frankly I have invested an enormous amount of money into my education and if I want to sell those notes, I will.
If I stop posting will you be happy
Yes, you should have a PhD granted by your peers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"I for some reason find that rather ridiculous."
Which doesn't bring us any closer to determining whether it's valid in law.
Honestly... What classes do people need notes for. We aren't talking about graduate level classes here. Anything you'd learn in any of these class the professor didn't make up themselves. I guess whatever I design as an engineer I'm going to have to give royalties to my professors who taught me. That sounds logical.
I have been a college professor at times (although now I write computer programs, mostly). I was absolutely shocked and dismayed by the actions described of the UC schools to try to "lock down" *knowledge*. This is completely antithetical to the purpose of universities.
I agree the resale-for-profit of student notes is a little bit crass. But no big deal in the end. But the greater point is that it shows people actually WANT to look at the ideas described in professor's classes, and discuss them and share them beyond the confines of the classroom. As a professor, I can imagine no greater flattery of my teaching than having students bring them forth in such a manner. If they do, it shows I've done my job right.
Those other professors who get their panties bunched up over the "loss" of their ideas to the world at large are just simply *bad* people. That's not the nature of ideas, and sure as hell isn't what universities should be for. It is so sad that that's the direction things are taking.
Yours, Lulu...
P.S. Of course, I teach in the humanities, and what I teach is not rote discourses on narrow technical procedures. Good teaching in other areas isn't either; but it is easier for an engineering prof (to fail by) teaching by rote than it is for a humanities prof.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Granted that quite a few profs do good research that is not really why they are there. They're there to teach students who pay a lot of money to get a good education. I don't want some teaching aid teaching me a class. I want the prof. to do that.
Most of this technology used for the Internet came from the military, not colleges. And the truely great advances usually come from companies. Profs always semm to just come up with theories.
There is one way to solve this. Start your own university. Oxford was started 800+ years ago by two kids who got kicked out of a Paris Uni. It's time to start an Internet University. No fees, no registration, no entrance requirements, no BS, and no corporate university restrictions on knowledge. Mark
Mark
The so called verbatim notes, where a student acts as an emenuensis of the professor, are indeed a fixing of the actual words and performace of the prof and would be protected by copyright. This is not news and is unquestioned as trite law. Non verbatim notes, however, are not the fixing of a performance, but the distillation of ideas expressed through words. They would not be subject to IP rights at law, unless the quotation was direct and extensive. Even so, it would be a value added derivitive work with a secondary copyright cobbled on by the note-taker. All of this is beside the point. The agressive use of copyright to strangle free discussion of ideas, whether it be through this claim over IP or the Scientologists, is dangerous. Doubly so when advocated by professional educators.
.Robert
Perhaps theology?
information doesn't want to be free. I want it to be free. It's cheaper for me that way.
why can't I take somebody's very hard work, such as a lecturers unique compilation of knowledge, then claim to earn money for my hard work of dictation?
Of all the... If I went there, I'd leave that school.
I go to your classes. I've paid to go to your classes, in fact. And once I've been there, the knowledge I've gained is mine . It is unique to me; the student next to me did not get exactly the same knowledge, nor the one two rows back. Even the professor's knowledge isn't the same as mine is; probably because the professor was unable to go through all of the material but possibly because I had some unique insight.
My mind and my knowledge belong to exactly one person: me. No one, not sniveling corrupt professors, not hardcore drug dealers, not tyrannical governments or administrations, will ever take it from me; I would rather die before I allow that. And if I decide to share my knowledge for free, though I may have paid to gain it, tough luck for anyone who's deluded enough to think they have a claim on what I know.
The philosopher, Aristotles, (on whose ideas much of Western thought is based) never wrote those ideas down (at least in any form that survives today). The books we attribute to Aristotle are all based on the notes his students at the Lyceum took while he lectured.
One could even call Plato's Dialogues "lecture notes of Socrates' dialogues" (although they are really more of a fictionalized memoir of Socrates with a lot of Plato's ideas probably put into Socrates mouth to give them more weight).
It seems to me the legal issues here are clear: If the notes are in the student's own words, it is clearly legal to publish them. If they are the direct words of the professor (and he meets the other requirements of statutory copyrighting), then publishing them would be a violation of whatever copyright might legally exist.
Interestingly, copylefting may actually prove more easily enforced in this case (as it deals directly with derivative works). Does anybody know of any professors who are making open-source-style announcements in their classes?
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
but the research is most probably publicaly funded, which should make the results of the research accesible to the public this may be a knee-jerk reaction by the colleges who are afraid of people educating themselves without paying tuition. so now learning & pubicaly available information is against the american system. let's just hope someone doesn't claim IP on air, or patent breathing, or trademark exhaling, or everyone in the US will owe royalties just for living.
"if I go into the theatre with a legal pad and write down a scene-for-scene description of a film and later attempt to sell my account, am I violating the film's copyright? I'm not really going to be able to record much of the content - I can't get exact lines, describe costumes and cinematorgraphy in detail and so on. "
Yep, you sure are violating the copyright. If I take an Andy Warhol painting, digitize it, distort it until it's unrecognizable, am I violating his copyright?
Yep! Derivative work! But hey boys, Linux is a copyrighted work. If I take the Kernel code, transcribe it on paper with only fair accuracy, then change it so it's 99.99% different, do I own the copyright? Hint: better talk to Linus before selling it!
I didn't study much in college either, though I did attend classes. It helped that I was studying math and physics, two terribly easy subjects if you have much of a knack for them.
I should mention, though, that when I got to grad school in physics I had to change my ways. I started studying, and I realize now that had I been working harder all along I'd be a much better physicist than I am now.
Incidentally, I recently experienced a curious turn-around to the whole "who owns the notes" issue. A year and a half ago I attended an advanced graduate course in quantum information theory and quantum computing. One lecture the prof. tossed out a problem as being an unsolved, fundamental problem in the field. I shared my ideas on the problem, and sketched out a proof for the problem at hand. Recently I discovered that this prof's research group published two papers on this topic using these ideas as the critical basis for their proof. (Though I received some lukewarm acknowledgements for my contribution, I believe I deserved at least partial authorship for the contributions. But that is neither here nor there....) In the context of this discussion, it prompts one to wonder "who owns the students' comments said during a class?"
After all, we're raking the big bucks with their knowledge. Thiefs we are! One and all! Just like the w4r3z k1dd13z.
I agree with your interpretation if you're assuming that the notes were a verbatim copy of what the professor said (or in your experience wrote on a board?)
That's totally different to my experience of university though and I'm not at all convinced that you could have gained much from your experience of copying verbatim from a board. All the notes I took were er.. well, notes, my summary of what I was being taught, not transcripts of lectures, and no board involved.
This is also an issue at Harvard. The campus paper ran a story on it which can be found here : http://www.thecrimson.com/features/article.asp?ref =4192
Several profs complain about intellectual property issues. There's also a question about how reliable the note-taker is (especially when incentives are based on quantity, not quality). In any case, the real point at Harvard is that it's against the Rules. :-)
Uncharitable question :
do professors feel more posessive of their notes when they're more ``famous" and can expect more revenue from publishing them?
When I take class notes, I often have thoughts of my own that I know aren't part of the class lecture itself ... I mark these with a "self:" in a circle next to the paragraph so that I know for future use (especially essays in that course) whether to credit the prof when citing my notes, or whether to simply state the thoughts as my own.
I know full well that most everything I write down from class is owned by my school. The school pays the teachers good money for the actual copyright on their lectures and also pays them for the lecture time itself. That way, the school can hand off the notes to a new teacher or to other teachers (most often) without the first teacher being upset about the information sharing.
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I would agree that the proofs themselves are not origional, however, the commentary and the manner in which the proofs and theorems are presented could possibly be copyrighted. While the note taker can copy down the notes for fair personal use, I could certainly see if I posted my exact copy of Rudin (Junior) to the net, McGraw Hill would be on my tail in a second. This is even more true if I did not properly attribute my source. Most profs I have had, do attribute sources - usually verbally ( "This is straight from Rudin", "I am taking this from Stewart, but changing the x to an xi for clairity..." ). I have never seen someone write attributions on their notes - perhaps in this case, the buyers to ask that the notes be properly attributed.
My whole argument is that copyright law does become fuzzy in this area. It is unclear on which side it falls - on a case to case basis.
( For the record - I have handed in proofs almost straight from rudin, for home work assignments, with proper referals to the source, and never had a problem. Got the damn things right, too )
If a University has such a policy written into its contract then students are obliged to follow them as long as the student agrees to them upon enrollment. However if there is no such policy nor a precedent with the law then the students are not necessarily obliged to honor the Universities request. Therefor this problem can be solved by looking into the University in questions policy. I would suggest that every other college in the universe make a policy on this regardless of what your opinion is. Policies are what make the world go 'round.
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear."
Immoral ? I will tell you what is immoral. Immoral is to have someone with a Phd that can't even speak proper english teaching to an english speaking university. Why ? Cause he agreed to get paid less.I had one such painfull experience personally while at my 2nd year. Immoral is to have a prof teaching while his interest is not teaching students and trying to make his students learn,but his interest is how to finish his research paper so he can get another grant and keep his position for next year.That is not byitself bad but when the forementioned person cannot teach or is unwilling to teach it is bad in my honest opinion. A prof must LIKE teaching.More importantly he must be ABLE to teach his students. Even more important at the university level(and every level for that matter)is that he must be able to make the students to WANT to LEARN FROM him. Immoral is having a prof that is TOTALLY uncapable of teaching, teaching a 3rd year rather complicated course,while many students allready complained about his inability to teach to the administration not only in recent years but in past years as well.... Lastly , just because someone has a Phd or a Masters degree that does not qualify him as a prof. Even if the person teaching is a nobel prize winner again that does not qualify him as a prof. A prof MUST have the ability to pass his knowledge to his students. A prof MUST be able to make his students U N D E R S T A N D what he is talking about in class. A prof must NOT consider teaching as a chore. He must LOVE teaching,he must LIKE teaching. The sad fact today is that universities are NOT about teaching. They are about making a quick buck.
saw this coming! transpublishing would dictate that eh prof should get a royalty.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
One possible solution is for the professors to post the notes on the web themselves... This has many advantages... first, the professors will clearly own the IP rights to these notes... and I would think that no one would buy these notes if they were available for free, places like study24-7 would all but dissapear... also they do the whole academic community a great service when they do this. Often times I have found the notes for classes at other univeristies quite useful. In almost all of my classes the professors post some form of class notes or lecture slides on the web. This makes for a much better classroom envrionment as it frees the students from having to spend time copying stuff down and they can actually spend the class time thinking, asking questions, and discussing, much better uses of class time I think. And if professors are unwilling to do this, I support other people posting them on the web, and if they want to make advertising money, more power to them... these notes can be a great learning tool. As for IP issues... I would think it is fine as long as they don't use the professors actual words in the notes.
Ben
However, if I took notes in class, (with the way I take notes) then those notes would be my ip and not the profs. I cannot write fast enough to write down the profs word for word. I record what I think are the important points in my own words. I add my thoughts and insights. I hi-light the things I think I need to remember. These are my writings and I own the copyright in them.
Is this making sense to anyone?
You cannot copyright your ideas! Your writings and speaches, yes, but not your ideas! The lectures are not trade secrets, are they? They are not patented, are they? That leaves copyright as their only protection.
The only question that remains is whether my writing is a derivative work. If I go to see a football game on the weekend and write an essay on the game, am I creating a derivative work and violating someone's copyrights?
I don't think so, do you? I am willing to be convinced however!
A Nony Mouse
Thank you. I haven't set foot in a college classroom for over 20 years, but I seem to recall it was expensive back then, forget about now. Secondly, if one is at a state college or university, then state and/or federal funds are used. It seems the material presented for the public funds would become that, public. As for copyright issues, I would think whatever ends up in most students notes would be covered in fair use. (I WOULD agree it'd be copyright violation to post direct copies of data, if the original specified that. Then again, is the professor infringing on copyrights if he distributes such.) One might add that if the professor spends his entire classes simply reading copyrighted material, then the college should get a junior or senior TA to do the job, it'd be cheaper. The notes are the perception of what was said, their own piece of work. Hmm. I'd guess that the students should be the ones to copyright their notes. This all reminds me of the arrogant academic elite of the 60's (my day). What a crock.
If someone further down's already asked this, then shame on me, but with the brouhaha about MP3s, I'm surprised nobody's thought to ask this yet.
What about tape-recordings of lectures?
It's relatively easy, now, to tape-record lectures, then record them into digital form and cook them down to MP3. (I recorded the Hasbro-Kenner panel at BotCon '99 on a microtape machine and cooked it down thusly; it only came to 18 megabytes for an hour and is still available on my BotCon '99 webpage for all comers.) I'm now recording one of my lecture classes the same way--not for help studying, but because the Prof. is an A1 Cynical Bastard (TM) and funny as hell, and his class is at least 30% amusing digressions by weight.
What if companies start paying for and selling lectures that way? I imagine there's no way in hell they'd get away with it, but the difference is only one of degree, isn't it?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
And you are correct; you cannot tape a ball game and show it publicly (whether or not you make money from doing so). However, you can report on what happened in the ball game, and the report can be fairly detailed, for instance, it could include inning-by-inning box scores, commentary on the players' performance, and so on. When comparing lectures to ball games, I would argue that notes from a service are a lot closer to box scores than to rebroadcast.
-r
My undergrad class notes don't contain anything that hasn't been said thousands of times before by thousands of different people. If I edited them into a book and sold them, there isn't a chance in hell I'd get sued. Why sue for selling them on the web?
As for the advanced classes - most profs are adamant about getting their ideas disseminated without anything but a token payment. If some web site wants to push their ideas and properly credits them, why should it bother anyone?
Next they'll be telling me I can't teach calculus without a license from my Calc I prof. Just plain dumb.
What else can be said?
Try this. Take your car to a dozen mechanics. The ones who don't want to let on how they work or what's really going on are usually the least competent and live in constant fear of being replaced by a brighter youngster.
Sounds to me like these Professors have the same problem. I am taking bets as to weather there is a single nobel prize winner in the lot.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Since notes are written by students who did not sign any contract restricting their rights to use the information they learned at their university. This lawsuit won't go anywhere.
I don't know about the liberal arts since that is not my field; I am in applied physics. But let me tell you, it is not the rare prof who starts a company. Many do. I could name 3 or 4 right now, but I want to stay anonymous. But if you did some research, you'd find that I'm right. Now, this is not the case at all colleges, to be sure- I'm referring to the major ones, the ones you always hear about.
A large portion of my college's administration consists of lawyers- patent lawyers, who spend their time patenting the stuff that the profs develop, and then license it to companies. This is a huge part of what my college does.
Are there some hurdles- is there some wheel-spinning? of course! But where is this not the case?
For the most part, in my experience, the current academic situation _in the upper ecelons_ of the US is fairly adept at weeding out the second rate students, and manufacturing new ideas. If I could only tell you some of the stuff that is going to hit the market soon- straight from a prof's lab.
It is remarkable how short sighted it is possible to become, just looking at the technical companies that are responsible for the immediate innovations in our lives. Consider, say, Schlumberger antenna designs. They are done completely outside academia, in a corporate lab somehwere. The free market system at work! Who needs academic handouts.
But what software do the scientists at Schlumberger use? Software developed in academia, almost invariably. And in the few instances in which it is being marketed by an external company, the company is usually a direct spin-off of a professor's work. If you look at the technical content of academia and industry, this is no surprise. The quality and power of the technical work done in academia is almost always far superior to that done in the private sector. If you want a further demonstration, try searching for literature in, say, the FDTD algorithm (used for electromagnetic simulation). All of the literature is being written by professors and their students.
Our economy is completely reliant on our university system, especially as we cease being a manufacturing economy. The danger is that this dependance is more or less invisable, until you look closely. So please do, before you call professors useless.
You claim that college professors are the most "out of touch" people on the face of the earth. Can you "prove" they're even out of touch--let alone one of the most "out of touch" groups? Where are your facts?
What law says students can do whatever they want with their notes? Ignoring law for a second, many colleges have policies against "anything". You can't take an audio recording without permission. You can't photograph without permission. Verbatim notes might very well count as an IP violation, as absurd as it might sound. I'm not entirely opposed to the notion either.
Do the professors fear loss of income on future textbooks that they might write?
Do they think that the students who buy notes won't show up in class... and that somehow will impact their standing (feedback scores, exam result medians, etc.)?
Is there just competition in the notes-selling business? (A lot of comments seem to support this.)
I don't know and I don't think it matters.
I'm personally sick and tired of someone trotting out copyright law and trying to mould it to fit their hand so that they can use it as a club to beat off competition. There are 1,000,001 interpretations of the law... and almost all of them were conceived and written before xerox machines and the 'net changed the playing field.
Don't talk about law. Talk about what is "right" and "good".
THEN talk about law.
-Eldurbarn
> The university is blowing smoke.
Actually, they're worried that students who can buy notes won't feel the need to go to class, with the result that the school will lose revenues from parking tickets and the alumini association will lose revenues from vending machines (with the catastrophic result that they'll have less money to spend to hire the best athletes).
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No. But if you tell a particular person that a particular method of killing a particular victim would only leave them liable for manslaughter rather than murder, you've probablhy crossed the line.
Stating the law is not the practice of law. Advising on what the law means to a course of conduct by a particular person--such as the notetaking above--is the practice of law.
Also note that getting it wrong leaves you open for malpractice litigation, regardless of whether or not you charged for the bad advice.
I guess this goes to show that professors and the institutions they represent are generally mercenaries interested in the almighty buck than genuine intellectuals interested in contributing to humankind's pool of knowledge.
c)we can't have the longest running/largest student run celebration unless we agree to every one of the administrations demands. (any guesses of where I go to school yet?) I'll bite. What is UF?
This is surprisingly similar to pro and anti OSS/Free Software arguments. With your tuition, are you paying for the end product, which is knowledge in your mind? Or are you paying for the "source" as well, the materials, notes, etc.?
I think this is where the real debate is, open source or not? Whether or not derivative products, like notes, are free?
The similarities are uncanny.
Well let me remember..... I sold hamburgers at McDondald's, plasma, my car, beer (I had a drinking age connection) and tons of other stuff I don't remember. Yeah I probably would've sold sold my notes. :) BTW I got and agree with your point but it's pretty easy now that I'm a little better off.
How does this differ from, say, box scores being a representation of a baseball game? Isn't there a long-standing tradition that it is perfectly legitimate to summarize and report on events that occurred in a public place?
When I give a lecture, what I see happening is that I stand up in a public place, and I disseminate some knowledge, which the students try to absorb. Probably they will write notes to help them in this process.
Now, what happens if somebody (for the sake of argument, let's say someone who isn't in the class, but who is nevertheless interested) asks one of those students, ``What did Dr. Link go over in class today?'' Well, they will probably report a summary of what happened. They might refer to their notes as they do so. I hope you would not claim that this constitutes an infringement of copyright. The right to talk about what you did in class today seems pretty fundamental to me.
But, if we're willing to grant students the right to talk about what they heard in class, then why not the right to write about what they heard in class? (Perhaps they only communicate with their friends by post or email, for instance.) And if we're willing to concede that I'm not being harmed by any of this, then why should I care if they do it for a fee, rather than gratis? Are they somehow harming me by collecting money, when they weren't harming me by doing it for free? It seems wrong for me to invoke the power of the state to punish these students when they are not harming me.
I worry when I see trends like this. I hope I never live to see the day when professors can (or even want to, for that matter) require NDAs for students taking their classes. I like to think that as scholars we are above that sort of thing.
-r
Let's face it. If these college professors were at all on the ball, they'd sell their own notes to 24-7 and make as much doe as the note takers--
In order for ANY claim of Intellectual Property to be made, the lecture must be copyrighted before the first presentation of the lecture. If a professor changes his lecture notes, or his lecture, they must have a new copyright. A university cannot assert anything is property unless they can show that it is.
Thank God I went to school in missouri. Very strong privacy rights. You had to specifically ask to have finger turned on for your user account (otherwise someone could discover that you were a student). Parents would call to find thier son/daughters phone number and be told that they can't even confirm that the person goes to the school.
Rob
I'd say they don't have a leg to stand on unless the notes were copied word for word. It's about time students have a way to earn some money back after the school, the loan company, and the text book companies all screw them for as much as they can. Someone mentioned a web site that gives away all the answers, a fantastic idea I think. I always thought the idea of academic cheating was stupid. If giving them the right answer gives them another chance to learn then great! Schools are there to teach, not grade. I like schools that only teach and ask you to be certified by an outside party that doesn't teach. That is much more fair I think and in general a better idea.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Just to make things interesting, let's put another foot or hand in the moving machinery:
If the information is question is copyrighted by one legal means or another, ie. "fixed form" into a book or an visual or auditorial exact copy, then could the mind be considered another means of accomplishing this fact? This seems to be the questionable issue with the student's "notes" here.
Say I take a Engineering class, in which I would normally take notes, mostly as a memmnoic device. If my notes are restricted by the licensing terms of the information that is presented to me, does that also me that my brain also now contains licensed information, and should be govered by the same rules? If I want to use/reproduce that information later, do I then need to apply for permission to use it just like a another physical device?
Perhaps in the future it will be possible to enforce copyrighted data in people brains by creating the ability to remove it, by force if need be. The world is become much too dependant on a information regulation as it is without taking the idea of IP to it's theoretical extreme.
Now if you will excuse me, my school wants back what I learned in the last few years in college.
*** Bzzzzt! ***
In many states, you could be required to notify a professor if you planned to record his lectures. Furthermore, once in a fixed medium, it could actually enjoy copyright. This isn't generally true for public discourses, but a college lecture isn't the same thing as a public speech - you paid to get in.
I'm not sure, but I think a verbatim copy of the lecture sold surrepticiously might be illegal, but I can't think of a case or law in particular.
Furthermore, that's not what's going on. Notes are just notes. Had I made notes from a written textbook and published them - these notes providing a summary of material and a sketch of the arguments presented - I think that usually qualifes as fair use. Certainly I have done so many, many times with academic texts without ever being challenged - so long as I plainly acknowledged my sources and avoided plagarism.
I don't think that selling notes substantially diminishes the value a professor gets out of his preparations. It does little to help other profs, except perhaps secondarily by pointing out what material other profs are covering. It is doubtful that the notes can, by themselves, substitute adequately for a class. Any class that you can pass by doing nothing but reading the notes is not a very good class to begin with.
(N.B. In the French university system when I was a kid, you could be required to take two or more classes that met at the same time. Usually, you would cut a deal with someone else in the same situation to bring you a copy of the hand-outs and their class notes. You could pass this way - but usually only for classes that were very structured and stodgy - things you should have been able to learn from video tapes or books anyway. I don't know if this true anymore - I never went back to France and my time there was more than a decade ago. I hope the system has improved - there was much good in the French system, but there was also a lot of crap.)
I've taken a look at versity.com, and the quality of notes is pretty marginal. I don't think it will interfere with marginal profs. It might actually help students with overburdened schedules - there are plenty of those. It could also help students to evaluate in advance the kinds of classes they are paying for, and determine their needs better.
True, some alcoholic frat boy may pass a few extra classes that they haven't attended because of publicly available notes - but any university where a student who has never learned the material can still get their diploma isn't a school worth paying for.
If universities want to stop this sort of activity on philosophical grounds, rather than control issues, I would advise them to begin their own websites for posting prof's notes. The prof's notes will likely be superior to any student notes and few students will bother with these private sites. Once in fixed form - even on the web - notes become fully protected by copyright.
True, a university might accidentally pass useful knowledge on to someone who has the temerity not to pay for it, but so what? A university - even a private one - exists to serve the public. They have no place handing out non-disclosure agreements like some Silicon Valley start-up. If their job isn't to propagate knowledge, they what reason should they have to exist? Besides, few students (I suspect) enroll in college to get an education - most just need an accredited paper degree to get a good job. The ones who do come to learn will probably need the classes anyway.
Besides, seeing profs put their notes on the web might lead to other profs evaluating their own performace relative to competing institutions. They would be compelled to provide more than just a droning voice for a couple of hours a week - they might actually have to add value to their lectures.
Stranger things have happened.
Take a look at Peren's site he has the proposal from Cornell which has pretty much the exact same wording. Cornell claims that notes are derivative work of the intellectual property of the faculty!
Notes taken by students are property of the student. I have been through this fiasco at 2 universities setting up this type of business. They can complain all the want, but these "study aides" are simply lecture notes...interpreted, written and property of student.. Sorry profs, attendance at class will continue to decline :(
When I took notes in school, and it was required, this would not have been acceptable. They'd have to be enough for the teacher to read and understand. When I wasn't required to take notes, I didn't - far too distracting, and if I forget something, I'm better off with the book anyway.
Some how I doubt that, that 2 million number is exactly correct. If less than 5% of the working age population is unemployed (130 million, I think?). That would mean phd's form almost 50% of the unemployed. Which seems unlikely for a variety of reasons. In addition, I have trouble believing 2 millions people went for a phd.
Actually Legal precedent has already been set. In 1993, the University of Florida lost a lawsuit against A+ Notes, a hard copy note-taking service. The jury, in a federal district court, concluded that the facts or ideas expressed by a professor during the course of a lecture could be considered part of the public domain and therefore legal to disseminate. What Study24-7.com is doing is perfectly legal. Their service is a supplement to classroom work, not a replacement. Professors traditionally encourage students to conduct study groups and exchange notes, as they have proven to help improve grades through better understanding of the subject. So, what is the problem? Oh yeah - the professors are not getting the cash, instead the students are.
So if I tell you not to kill someone does that mean I'm practicing law without a license?
I personally agree with the professors: they are the ones who put the time into making a study plan, and formulating the knowledge in those notes. The students just showed up to class to copy them for their own reference.
When I was going to university, I used to take my class notes on my PalmPilot. It wasn't uncommon for people to ask for a copy of my notes, which I gave. Eventually I figured that I would just put them up on my web page so that people who didn't know me could just get a copy whenever. I went to the prof to ask his permission because I thought it the notes were his copyright.
It turned out I was actually wrong. My prof had borrowed the lecture notes from another professor under the conditions that no electronic copies of them would be made for massive distribution. So the notes actually belonged to another professor, and if I had just stuck them up on the web, my prof may have gotten in some trouble. I certainly didn't want this since I rather liked my prof (among the best 3 I've had).
The moral of the story is that by making copies and posting them on services like this, you can get other people in to trouble that they really don't deserve. By doing so for financial gain, especially for something that you really did no real work for, makes the offense even greater. I hope that students won't screw their professors over for this site and/or I hope that the site folds for publishing materials they don't have the copyright to.
-no broken link
Commercial notetaking attacks (one of) the universities' principal revenue streams: the *selling* of faculty teaching for tuition.
:-)
If there were web-sites that had consensus (student and domain expert) best-of-breed notes on any particular undergraduate topic, would students still be as motivated to attend any one particular bricks-and-mortar college?
When a student from MIT (or Oxford) checks out the lecture notes from a CalTech faculty member, CalTech doesn't make any money (or vice versa).
What do you think *pays* for all of those administrative "services" your friendly college bureaucrats provide (like the parking Gestapo
Faculty, on the whole, are every bit as captive to the demands of feeding the administrative overhead maw as students are. Every grant proposal they write *must* ask for more money than they need to do the work. Overhead rates in Universities I have been associated with ranged from 60% on upwards.
My professor once said, "Someone is taking my notes, and copyrighting them." (there is always a little disclaimer on the bottom of the notes) There are some interesting questions that need to be answered. You could almost think of it, as if you went to see a band in concert, taped it, copyrighted, and sold it. It is very similar, you are paying admission to the concert (tuition), and you are making a copy (the students impression of notes). However, since I am not a legal expert I can't make a judgement, but there are some similarities.
The worst part is, when professors buy the notes and make exams from everything that was covered in class that wasn't on the notes. I am not a fan of the notes....
Ben
Ever had a class, where the mandatory text justy happened to be written by the teacher/whatever. It happened to a class of 400, except only 100 books arrived for the start of the semester, because they were printed overseas... The Lecturer said his notes were now copyright... yadddaa. book rights .. publisher... He was a dean + head of school, so complaining got nowhere. Shitty teacher, and the book was crap too. Universities shoud dismiss lazy gold diggers like these, as nothing below PHD level is original, plus they are already being well paid to 'teach' Good lecturers were ok - open slather on notes, but more sensitive on tapes (daggy looks - no ties, or slurred words). These teachers were normal. I think notes are fine, but not so sure about a live videocam from the likes of stanford or others.
Who really cares? If students want to download notes from the web so be it. It is still on them to learn the material. At my university many professors post notes they created via powerpoint and the like .. I can understand property rights when it comes to that, if someoen takes the time to creates powerpoint slides or whatnot of notes, then they own that product. However, it is ridiculous that a professor "owns" what they regeritate from a book onto the board. It is absurd.
im sure the profs are all thrilled that the administration at UCLA pretends to speak for their rights. im sure the profs dont want to speak out about it for fear they will get fired by said administrators who pretend to care so much about their rights.
My college had an honor code that was actually pretty strictly enforced.
If this is true:
"Our code of student conduct prohibits students from taking and distributing notes without the professor's permission," Mr. Zuidema said.
Then the school has every right to punish those who are distributing the notes.
However, I went to a private school, and UCLA is a public school... most likely it is more difficult to enforce a college code there.
Kinda like how the Boy Scout's are allowed to exclude homosexuals because it is a private organization, while obviously the government would never be allowed to do that.
the administrators at university would say 'oh no you dont, give that money to us' then the profs would be pushed by the admin to cater their class notes to these services, shrug off teaching altogether, and rake in the money
congrats.
you are an annoying waste of bandwidth to people who planned on talking about notes ownership
pay more attention to the goddam road!
Presumably they will investigate the possiblity of a lawsuit, but their lawyers tell them they haven't a leg to stand on, so this foolishness will never disturb the interior of a courthouse.
This really makes me laugh. Every Frat house at the college I went to had extensive files of notes, homework assignments and exams dating back many many years. The dorm I lived in had similar, although not nearly as comprehensive. This just levels the playing field for the rest of us.
I think it is time that the Professors realize that the undergrads are not there to support the Professors little pet projects at any given time and that these same professors start getting off their duffs and doing what they are supposed to and coming up with new and exciting content to teach these students who are paying good money to get a quality education.
And yet your sig says, "If you want to quote me in an article, contact me for permission". Why? How can you claim ownership of words you posted in a public forum?
There is alot of good reasons for university's to get upset about this issue. It maybe something simpler than the professors being ashamed of their lectures. It could be greed driving the hole thing. Institution's like UCLA could be upset about not getting payed for your learning, because that is how they make their money (I know you can't get a job that requires a degree with out having one, but knowledge is power!). Second, If you read the notes before taking the classes, you have an unfair advantage over the other students. I have thought of one other idea. I release that this next idea is unlikely but not impossible. University's could be worried about someone posting notes full of incorrect information, giving the reader a false understanding (intentional or not) of what he/she just read. If this happened who would be at fault? The university, the person who posted the notes, or both? This is a notice informing all journalists that I must be contacted first to be qouted outside of this Slashdot discussion. To contact me remove the no-spam from my e-mail address.
employers know perfectly well that people without degrees can do the same jobs. but employers have to justify their decisions to their bosses, to their shareholders, and to what ever other uptight stuffed shirt moron is pulling their strings. likely this person has a degree, im not sure why. . . maybe becayse money tends to send its kids to university and ... money flocks together ... but im not sure.
A reason why universities may want to stop this sort of thing, but citing intellectual property violations is, IMHO, disingenuous(sp).
I figure they would want to stop this because it dilutes the value of having particular people to teach classes. I, as a GMU student, could augment my education by reading the notes from professors at UCLA, and not pay them a dime.
Most of my professors put a lot of notes on thier web sites or make copies available for cost to any comers. This is the Way of the Future(tm) and any professor or school fighting this is just being clueless.
I'm a college student- If I use the knowledge I have gleaned from school in my work, do I have to pay royalties to my professors? NO! Notes, unless they are a transcript of what the teacher is saying, are obviously not the property of the teacher, any more than are the locations of bookmarks that I've placed in my textbooks the property of the author.
Sheesh..
chris
Surfing the net and other cliches...
Surfing the net and other cliches...
(Who Meta-Meta-Moderates the Meta-Moderators?)
When you go to a concert and the band sucks YOU DO NOT GET YOUR MONEY BACK.
... tools... (siglim 120 chars)" Like cars... to the office no more no less.
When you talk to you school Dean and President and tell them the class you've been paying for isn't teaching you any of what was promised, you can very likely get a refund.
The Application fee IS your admission charge.
Excuse me while I throw up.
"Computers should be
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Whatever they want? If the professor reads a copyrighted work (not such an unusual thing to do in a class), and the student writes down the words, can they the republish the work? It is, after all, written down in their notes. As for whatever else a professor might say, well, if the professor wrote something down, there would be an automatic copyright, right? I wonder is the same is true of what they say. (Don't know for sure.) Regardless, posting the notes against the professor's wishes is, if nothing else, rude. While rudeness should by no means be outlawed, it is sad to so often see rudeness encouraged and cheered.
I have h@x0red your system!!!!! Ha ha ha!!!!!
www.versity.com
www.allstudents.com
This intellectual property thing is really getting out of hand. Does this mean that we are not allowed to apply whatever we learn from school and university unless we are given "permission" by the teachers and professors? What about the ancient Greeks? Did they give permission to professors to write textbooks and make money off it? Just about everything in modern science and technology we owe to the ancient Greeks. We should start paying the Greeks royalties for using their ancestors' ideas! :-)
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
You are a total moron. I am sorry that you have no respect for post doctorate professionals both in industry and those in academia. Without colleges and especially without professors using what gifts they have to advance society whether on a technological level or a social level you and I would not be having this conversation. Get out, get real, and open your eyes. These people are the foundation of what we have today. Industry is nothing without them.
Well, having just matriculated from a fine public four-year institution, I guess I'm qualified to comment on this. On every piece of code I handed in for an assignment, was placed a copyright notice. I chose to retain all rights for a good 75 years on it (most of it is simply collections of excrement, but that's not the point). Never did I sign or imply that I would assign title to the school (key word no implied consent). Although assignment may be in the school's policy guide, given the way mosts states' laws are on this subject, that portion would likely be null and void anyway. I'll get back to this after an example.
How many of you out there had tech. internships while in college? How many got paid for it? I'd guess a lot. I know I did. How many of you know what the typical salary for a non-technical (non-technical being anything that won't produce IP)intern is? Pretty close to $0. The logic behind this is that the experience is considered enough compensation. There is no "intellectual property" to be transferred. Interns in tech fields get paid (sometimes quite well) because most of them sign agreements assigning all IP rights to the employer. No pay = no assignment = anything I do for said employer stays mine.
Back to the subject at hand. Since students are not being compensated by the school for being students (no, the knowledge doesn't count, my tuition paid for that), the school can't automatically become the assignee of IP rights. No student-generated code, lecture notes, inventions, etc.
Of course, the above applies only to undergrads. Graduate students employed as RA's by the school no doubt signed an assignment agreement with the school. Technically, the school can lay claim to anything they produce.
Now, IANAL, but methinks the school would have a very difficult time defending any claim against me in a court of law (technically, as a tuition-paying student, the school is my employee, or at least contractor), not even for the stuff produced during my 4 quarters as a undergrad TA (no agreement). Even if they did, thanks to the education they provided me, I've got a nice cozy grip of cash accessible to me. Coupling that with the fact that my alma mater's legal team is tied up with investigating academic fraud with a certain men's sports team, well, the outcome is easy to predict. Any attempt to stop me from profiting from my work (one of these days I'll have to have a closer look at Title XVII for definitions, etc.) would be met with lawyers paid from said chunk of change. And in the end, tuition would go up (what else is new?).
Funny thing is that UCLA student body organization, ASUCLA, has been selling notes to students for years. They pay someone 10 bucks per class and print the notes out. A student pays about $30 per quarter for the notes. As recently as 1997 (year I graduated), the program was expanding to include professors published homework and test solutions. Why now are they trying to say this is IP?
At my school, a prominent university in the Northeast, professors and preceptors have been quite adamant about finding and stopping those who put notes on sites like www.study24-7.com and www.versity.com.
In October, I was cornered by the preceptor and told that he thought I was the one putting the notes for our class on versity.com (I was not). What followed was a lengthy discussion with the professor, preceptor, department chair, and an assistant dean. In the end, I was acquitted of their suspicions.
I don't understand what the difference between giving copies of my class notes to friends and posting them on the web. I guess this mass dissemination of information scares people.
I'm sure we will see a court case that might set a precedent for these types of things soon.
What an idiot to think that slashdot might be full of a bunch of geeks and losers that could relate a chess anecdote to the subject at hand....
oh wait...
;)
Well, having just matriculated from a fine public four-year institution, I guess I'm qualified to comment on this. On every piece of code I handed in for an assignment, was placed a copyright notice. I chose to retain all rights for a good 75 years on it (most of it is simply collections of excrement, but that's not the point). Incidentally, as a result of this, I never saw my code used as an example in class, even thought it was frequently better than the example. Never did I sign or imply that I would assign title to the school (key word no implied consent). Although assignment may be in the school's policy guide, given the way mosts states' laws are on this subject, that portion would likely be null and void anyway. I'll get back to this after an example.
How many of you out there had tech. internships while in college? How many got paid for it? I'd guess a lot. I know I did. How many of you know what the typical salary for a non-technical (non-technical being anything that won't produce IP) intern is? Pretty close to $0. The logic behind this is that the experience is considered enough compensation. There is no "intellectual property" to be transferred. Interns in tech fields get paid (sometimes quite well) because most of them sign agreements assigning all IP rights to the employer. No pay = no assignment = anything I do for said employer stays mine.
Back to the subject at hand. Since students are not being compensated by the school for being students (no, the knowledge doesn't count, my tuition paid for that), the school can't automatically become the assignee of IP rights. No student-generated code, lecture notes, inventions, etc.
Of course, the above applies only to undergrads. Graduate students employed as RA's by the school no doubt signed an assignment agreement with the school. The school can, and should be able to, lay claim to anything they produce.
Now, IANAL, but methinks the school would have a very difficult time defending any claim against me in a court of law (technically, as a tuition-paying student, the school is my employee, or at least contractor), not even for the stuff produced during my 4 quarters as a undergrad TA (no agreement). Even if they did, thanks to the education they provided me, I've got a nice cozy grip of cash accessible to me. Coupling that with the fact that my alma mater's legal team is tied up with investigating academic fraud with a certain men's sports team, well, the outcome is easy to predict. Any attempt to stop me from profiting from my work (one of these days I'll have to have a closer look at Title XVII for definitions, etc.) would be met with lawyers paid from said chunk of change. And in the end, tuition would go up (what else is new?).
But, before I take this too far, I'd like Hawk's unofficial, non-legal-advice opinion on the subject (maybe its down there, I haven't read that far yet)
It's not an issue of whether the information the professors teach should be copyrighted. This information generally comes from any number of sources. The way in which they teach a class through slides, etc. is what the professors can and should copyright. It is an incredible amount of work to produce materials for a class. The format of the information which may be transfered into a students notebook can and should be copyrighted.
Last week there was a prof on NPR talking about this issue, and his take was that professors begin with this great huge un-sequenced body of work in their field, and they go through that work and apply order to it, in the form of narrative arcs, or outlines, or whatever. It is this ordering/editing/sequencing which is the supposed "intellectual property" portion of their lectures.
I was sitting there in the car screaming at the radio "but the fuggin students, in taking their notes, are applying their *own* ordering/editing/sequencing to the profs' lectures--therefore, if the profs can claim IP rights to their interpretations of the source material which they provide in their lectures, then by the same token the students must be allowed to claim IP rights to their own handwritten interpretations of the profs' lectures."
Of course, since we're still waiting for digital radio w/enough bandwidth to actually transmit my real-time bellowing from my car back to NPR in Washington, nobody heard me but me.
Anyway. My dad's a prof and I'm getting ready to go home for Thanksgiving, so I guess I'll ask him what he thinks. When I was teaching freshman english, I didn't give exams, so there wasn't a lot of note-taking going on in my classes to begin with. I hated the whole stupid attend-lecture/cram-notes/regurgitate-on-test cycle when I was in college, so as far as I'm concerned, anything to hasten its demise is more than welcome.
grady
Well, I am a college student so I think I am qualified to respond to this. So what if I take notes in a class and then put them on the internet. I actually took look at 24-7, and they don't charge anything to get the notes. The students are paid to post there notes. Many students are paid by their own universities to do the same thing, in SI sessions. Not only that, but the students are poor and could really use the money. After graduating these students are getting jobs. The university doesn't take anything out of there paychecks. The professors should just pipe down, and let the students fend for themselves.
In my opinion, the only thing which the college professors can claim to have intellectual property rights on are hard copies of their lectures that they themselves wrote. Many professors create transparencies, slides, and other hard copy notes for theirs students. These, I believe, belong to them and not the students.
Notes which the student took himself while attending a lecture is the student's own work and hence the student can claim intellectual property rights on those notes. For example, if I attended some conference, and the speaker presented a few ideas on a certain topic, and I later go back home and right an article on my interpretation of his ideas, that article belongs to me, not the speaker.
The professors can require, at most, acknowledgement in the students' notes that those notes were taken at a lecture by that professor. That would be nice, actually.
------------------
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
As far as IP rights go I don't think that UCLA is correct in their stance, however I think that most of the /. responses here have missed the point entirely. I am in my third year of undergraduate in Engineering Physics at a reasonably respectable Canadian University, and have had my fair share of good and bad teachers. One of the main things that distinguishes the good from the bad are the ability to arrange the course material in an interesting way and not just regurgitate from the textbook. In fact I find that the classes in which the prof just rewrites textbook material are better spent listening rather than notetaking. However, the notes that I find very valuable, are those that I take in classes given by the more gifted teachers. These notes usually bear no resemblance (other than the basic facts) to the textbook material, and are presented in a different and complementary way. I can't count the number of times I've had something go completely over my head in an abstract math textbook, only to have it clearly elucidated by the notes I had taken earlier that day, as my prof had explained it from a different approach. The profs that do this work hard to create these lesson plans and approaches, and not just to be paid, but also for the benefit of the students taking the notes. The best teachers teach because they care about the students. Therefore as a student I find the idea of taking these notes and selling them against the wishes of my proffesor repugnant to say the least. If my proffesor has no problem with distribution of his hard work ( he had to come up with the lesson plan and teh basic structure of the notes, all I did was write them down ) then I have no problem selling them. The key here is COURTESY. If you want to sell the notes to a course and they are from a lecture, it was probably a good, informative lecture, given by a caring, hard working proffesor. ASK him or her first before proceeding and don't sell them if they do not want you to. It is the least you can do for those teachers who care enough to raise the quality of education.
(see subject)... Why do people go to college instead of getting their own books and stuff and learning the stuff themselves? For a degree. Now why do we want degrees? So employers will hire us. Why do they want people they hire to have degrees? Because that proves that they know something. And how do they learn that? That is the question in question. Notes are what a student writes down of what they think is the imporant information in the professor's lecture. Then they use this to study for tests. I'm not in college yet, but I'll tell you one thing: I never study for tests. It works wonderfully; I've gotten a grade lower than an A on something major maybe 2 or 3 times ever. So how do I get my information? By paying attention during class (not sleeping). If only college kids would actually concentrate on learning instead of finding ways not to do their own work, I think that the American populus would be more intelligent as a whole.
Just to break that long paragraph up, consider the value of taking notes yourself. There is something that goes on in your brain when you write something down on paper that contributes a whole lot to the process of learning that information. You can skim over notes that someone else took and not get anything out of them, but it you write it yourself, it gets imprinted somewhere deep in your memory banks. That process is known as learning. On the other side, let's say you could pick up something, read it, and have it instantly memorized for life. Now, do you understand it? Could you teach it? Unless this person was some amazing note-taker, [s]he must have missed something of the presentation. Maybe it was some crucial fact, maybe it was an illustration that made things crystal-clear in the minds of the students. Real students would care about understanding the data stream being routed into their minds, and many people need the human standing in the front of the room to understand that.
Feel free to disagree with me. Just don't let me hear it. Okay, that's mean. I should say: if you have anything intelligent to say, say it, otherwise keep your fingers off of that keyboard.
Kenenth Arnold
Think of the question as a court would. Is there an analogy? When a Prof writes a book with his/her ideas and we buy it we pay $ for the ideas. When we go to class we pay money for the ideas. The Prof is getting paied for giving out this information. Hence we have paied for the rights. Also if these sites cited the professor and the class, there would be even less to argue about. Copy right only applies when making an exact copy, if you paraphrase (and I've never seen a set of notes that copies what a prof said word for word) you only need to cite the source no matter how much you read for that information. Frankly I think that by paying for the lecture is like paying for a book, you own the same rights. You may paraphrase and with in limit copy. (after all that is what the professor is doing, as the old quote says "we are standing on the shoulders of giants") Binky
I myself currently am employed by a notetaking service (versity.com) for transcribing my interpretation of the material presented in one of my courses. The key factor here is "interpretation" we were thoroughly told not to copy or post any copyrighted material or handouts. So long as a student is posting material that is written by themself as they view the material presented in class it is entirely legal however.
FWIW, I teach computer science at Mills College.
One aspect of this issue that nobody seems to have remarked on is that these problems are due to humungous class sizes. We don't have problems like this at Mills because of its small class sizes. All of the classes I have taught have had fewer than 20 students; some have had fewer than 10. I give out copies of my slides and additional handouts every class session. If a student missed class and wanted copies of my notes, she would ask me for them. Actually, if a student is absent, I save a set of handouts for her and give them to her next time. (I use "she" and "her" deliberately because Mills is a women's college.)
Because the class size at Mills is so small, it would be obvious to me if a student didn't attend class and learned only from the written material and other students. I actually think that doing so is fine and don't require class attendance. Despite this, students show up for class. I like to think it is because they get something from my lectures and discussions. It says a lot about the quality of the classes at some larger schools or the motivation of the students that so many students find classes not worth attending that there is a market for notes.
The claims so far, here on /., are that the student own the notes that they take. However, it is my experience that many people in math and physics write down word for word what the prof writes on the board. Some even use the exact same formating and annotation. Are these notes the property of the student? I beleive not. If word for word copies were permisable, I could copy out the latest best seller and publish on the web! I think the publisher and author would come after me fairly quickly.
I had a philosophy professor in college who
taught two requisite courses for the major:
history of ancient and history of modern philosophy.
He taught the same class each year. He taught
precisely the same course each year, without
variation. If you compared class notes over the
course of, say, ten years, it became evident that
he made the same jokes, in the same places, over and over.
He also tended to make the subject rather clear and lucid.
The intellectual property wasn't so much the notes
about the subject as the highly syncretic vision
of the history of philosophy which ol' Prof. Reiss
managed to hold in his head.
Man I miss being an undergrad.
Since when was *anything* you were taught in any school not "common knowledge"? How can this be considered IP?
If this was about research related materials they might have a point. But then again, if it is research, it will likely be published in some dusty old academic journal anyway.
I don't make money of the publication. There are no banner ads on the website.
I asked a media law professor about this: he said that it would be hard to sue me on copyright violation because this is a grey area. He told me that the way I handle it (no profit, asking first) is good.
Another professor told me that this topic is much debated among the professors, some being against it. They say that oral communication should never be transferred to a written medium (and they are communication scientists, so they seem have a clue).
I know a few other people who publicize or sell their notes. Some of them don't study anymore so they have no problem with posting even the "forbidden" notes. They simply don't ask.
The professors seem to be not very motivated to hunt for "illegal" notes; they know my site because I asked.
I think that posting university notes is OK (fair use) as long as no money is involved.
Computers. You can't live with them, you can't live without them.
Torng was my advisor for 2 years during my time at Cornell ... Torng actually patented his idea, so there was a very clear line that Intel crossed when they took his invention and used it in their Pentium chips without crediting him or paying any royalties due to Cornell.
If I'm not mistaken, how the story actually goes is that Torng presented his idea to Intel during a talk. Intel said that they weren't interested, but then went ahead and used it in their Pentium chips anyway. Torng and Cornell threatened to sue, but the matter was eventually resolved by having Intel 'donate' several million to Cornell, and awarding Torng an Intel fellowship (created specially for him apparently).
But a student's notes are normally just the teacher's words copied onto paper. This takes them out of the realm of public information and makes them intellectual property. Or, at least, I can see it being argued that way.
For the inherently lazy. What if you do have a class with notes online from the professor? How many college students are really going to not be lazy and rewrite them. This is just really indoctrinating them with the plug and chug strategy or copy things.
Anyway, the people who go through on scoop don't learn much. And I'm talking about the long term here. Is it me, or everyone looking for a cheap way out. I bet you Intel has some new engineers that can do QA since they blew through the class on scoop or something like that.
I haven't checked out that site though, mainly because I can't get in without signing up.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - F. Voltaire.
99% of the time, students are not taking down notes of the professor's original thoughts, but rather what the professor is reiterating from something that was originally thunk anywhere from 10 to thousands of years ago.
Its not as though this company is asking students to post notes from research experiments they participated in.
And furthermore, aren't my notes my interpretation of what the professor has to say? So in actuallity, all I'm really giving up is my intellectual rights to property that was [given to |purchased by ] me.
I actually plan on posting all of the source code and notes from all of the projects I've had to work on in school, not so that other kids can cheat off of my hard work, but so that they can benefit from someone else who's been there and done that.
To put it another way, lets take a typical CS course in C++. Let's suppose that we are working on a class BigInt, in which we plan on implementing all the usual functions for Integers of arbitrary size. Obviously, the best algorithms that we are going to find come (originally) from Knuth. Did the professor get permission from Knuth to use his intellectual property? Hell no!
I think sometimes schools [file|consider] lawsuits like this one just to get their names in the papers. They know that they are wrong, but they figure the publicity is worth the effort.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Here at Kansas State University, my we recently ran into this problem in
my Chemistry I class. She mentioned all the standard professor
complaints of intellectual property and all that BS.
Now doesn't the concept of "intellectual property" seem a bit ironic in a
college setting. In a sense, the term means you can't distribute something
I know. Doesn't that go against the whole philosophy of teaching? If you
don't want the information of your course to be spread, why the hell are you
telling a class of 400 people everything?
In addition, use of these sites can be very useful. Look up notes from other
universities in the same course. You can find different examples of the same
material. It will only help you learn.
Even if old tests become posted, it can only be of benefit to the students.
If the professor is so assinine as to never change his/her tests, the whole
course devolves into a course on memorizing old tests. It's easier sometimes
to just memorize an old test and regurgitate it on the test than it is to
rationalize and learn the material to take the test properly.
There's something they're not telling us here. It's an issue I think needs to
be properly discussed among professors to make them realize what their purpose
at their respective university is.
________________
/ A O S
I for one don't understand all the controversy regarding these issues. I think if a student posts notes or other material that a professor has photocopied and distributed to a student then this IS a violation of intellectual property rights. However, if a student is simply taking down their personal notes regarding a professor's lecture, it is THE STUDENTS INTERPRETATION of a professor's notes and thus not an infringement on the professor's intellectual property rights. In most cases, the notes I, and the majority of my collegues take omit some information, add additional information, paraphrase, and clarify upon a professor's presentation in such a way that the majority of the work done, and the material written is my own. In general the majority of college professors I have had have not given notes, as much as lectures and a few key points. It is the STUDENT's job to take the notes. The only grey area I see is if a professor writes notes on the board during the lecture, and the notes that are posted by the student on these websites do not differ from these notes. However, in the vast majority of these cases, professors (unfortunately) do not present data in this manner. Therfore, I think that intellectual property rights arguments could be legitimate on a case by case basis, viewed from the professor's perspective, but certainly not from the institution's.
Isn't that one of the main benefits of being in a fraternity? Having the work of your brethren available to use.
I think UCLA is freaking out because if this works out, then they are no longer the sole beneficiaries of the teachings from their professors. They essentially become no better the any other Uni offering the same courses if this info is not privy.
nonsense. The notes belong to the students. The only exception would be if the university were to have a (pre-published) intellectual property agreement. The agreement (or the document which contained it) would have to be given to the student and refrenced on some agreement which the student would have had to sign before enrollment. Also: A professor could ask students to sign an agreement to give up ownership of the notes. But that would seem silly. Now, lets get to the real reason that the universities are against this: 1) They want their students to go to class, rather than staying in bed and downloading the notes off the net. 2) The $30,000 schools dont want it to become known that they teach the same things as the "regular" schools. Its against the schools' interest to have Brown and Princeton students comparing their notes to those of state school students. 3) The schools have to invent something since they cannot sue for any of the reasons above (going to class is the students' responsibiity, the site cant be blamed if they skip). Since this type of intellectual property is untested, there is a chance that they could win.
Final Exam!
(where'd that go....can't find it)
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Professors, and the institutions, are asserting an intellectual property right to a student's notes on the content of lectures. They're dreaming. No such right exists.
Intellectual property rights only apply to ideas that have been reduced to fixed form. Fixed form means "written down" or "recorded"--only the fixed form of an idea is protected by copyright, the idea itself is not. Until the idea is reduced to fixed form it is just so much hot air.
For example, suppose I get up on stage and present a hilarious, moving expression--in rap--of the tribal customs of my ancestors (Scots) entitled "Getting Naked and Painting My Body Blue". If I have written those rap lyrics down beforehand, I can assert an intellectual property right. If you copy them down and repeat them, I can sue. But if I just start shouting extemporaneously, I have no rights--the words have not been reduced to fixed form.
An excellent example of this was Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. Consider how many times you have heard that speech. Now ask yourself--why don't Dr. King's children collect royalties on that speech? They can't--King spoke extemporaneously. The written copies of the speech were made from film footage of the event.
In the case of classroom notes the situation is made even easier--the written notes reflect the creative work of the note-taker. Suppose that you and I attend a lecture by Prof. Chris Berman at the University of Bristol. My notes might include lots of information about what Berman wore, what the lecture hall looked like, whether he looked smaller or larger than he appears on TV, and what the general reaction of the audience was. Your notes might indicate what Berman actually said. The difference between my notes and yours is the creative content that you and I add. And what each of us reduces to fixed form is our intellectual property.
But wait, there's more...
The university isn't just wrong in asserting that it owns the rights to the notes--it is wrong to assert in its code of conduct that students do not. Unless a student surrenders his intellectual property rights to all creative work when he enrolls, the university is infringing upon his rights to dispense with his property (his creative work) for however much he can make.
The university is blowing smoke.
Some of my professors have given us printed notes with copyright dates on them, and I would respect that (heck, when I use their notes in assignments, I'll usually reference them).
Handwritten notes, though, I consider mine and I've never been presented with any contracts from a prof about what I can and cannot do with information presented in class.
I would think this would mainly be an issue for grad students who are doing work under profs who are doing industry sponsored research, or who plan to publish papers based on their work. Who would care about CS101 notes, since they're pretty much the same world wide?
Dana
Geez .. I should retake english 101. Sorry about my grammar.
However, the question becomes, who actually owns the copyright? It should be the university, since the faculty are their employers and it is most likely "work-for-hire". And I would assume that a public university should have no problems with students re-publishing them on their own... however, if a commercial organization gets involved; then I would expect royalty arrangments.
This one is pretty cut and dry... for verbadim copies. Now, for some of my courses, my notes look _nothing_ like what the professor drew; my mental image was different (and often wrong...). Now, copyright law only protects the "expression" of an idea, not the idea itself. So, as long as a notetaker doesn't copy things exactly, or more appropriately, asserts their own interpretation -- then they are changing the expression, hence, copyright law does not apply.
So, to prove a violation, the professor needs to have a video of each lecture and then compare the notes to the video. Only if there are exact, verbadim copies does copyright law matter.
It depends.
In some cases, a student's interpretation of a lecture should not be considered a derived work. A summary of facts should not be considered copyright infringement _unless_ it substantially amounts to a verbatim repetition of the lecture itself. Facts themselves cannot be copyrighted.
However, the professor could claim ownership over the collection of facts in the lecture, and the way in which they were organized. This is allowed under standard copyright practices. There is room for both the students and the professors to argue whether particular forms of reproduction constitute infringement or not.
Transcriptions of what the professor says are subject to copyright, though, and they should have gotten permission from the professor(s) involved if they are going to reproduce them in their entirety.
A few quotations would be considered fair use. Quotations mixed with the student's original summary or outline would probably be fair use as well.
Of course, if the college's code of student conduct prohibited all this, that will be the issue involved, not all this talk of copyright infringement.
I think that most professors would encourage students to share this kind of information freely if they were asked about it first. Part of the problem is that this on-line note service is probably claiming that the on-line notes are THEIR copyrighted property, and they probably do not allow free reproduction of it once it's on their web site. Combine this with the fact that they probably run banner ads over it and I can see why a professor would be upset.
On the other hand if a student just posted a decent summary/transcription on a web site without trying to milk it for advertising, etc., I think most professors would consider this OK.
Private universities can legally place restrictions on students who wish to distribute class notes, but I believe public universities are on shaky legal ground. (IANAL, however) Course notes, as has been observed, are not direct transcriptions of faculty lectures, but the interpretations of the individual student; copyright protection should certainly not apply.
UCLA is clearly playing dirty pool to protect their own course-notes racket, but I also think they drink their own kool-aid on the issue of faculty lectures being protected IP.
The attitude expressed by Asst. Provost Sandbrook ("The issue here is faculty control over what's going on inside and outside of the classroom.") bespeaks a remarkable arrogance on his part - the fact that he believes the faculty should retain control of student behaviour and the free exchange of information outside of their fiefdom? Pathetic.
It also bears noting that Universities expect students to take the knowledge they have gleaned, and use it (at some level) to make a living. I would argue that these students are doing just that, and are showing some quick thinking to boot.
Does Mr. Sandbrook really expect that some other college professor at another university is going to poach their curricula by way of buying notes off a website?
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
The attack on student notes is just one more piece of evidence that even the "heavily branded" schools are fearful of the potential effects of widespread dissemination of knowledge on their revenue (and profit) streams. Don't kid yourselves students, taxpayers, foundations, and donors; universities are in the business of making MONEY. I applied for a grant through my school and the administrative boondogle (through which grants passed ) wanted to mark my chairman's time up %100 for time spent on the grant; reap 15% overhead on the total dollar value; and cap my requested salary on the grant through their wage and salary department. Regardless of what the IRS and government label it for income tax purposes, the non-profit categorization of institutions of higher learning is misleading and perhaps counterproductive to the educational, research, and service missions of universities. University professors are very fearful ( and rightly so) of the consequences of electronic dissemination of course materials. However, OPEN SOURCE textbooks would be beneficial to both students with limited incomes. Professors would prefer to brand their materials through established publishers so they can maximize the rent they can extract from a captive market. Slashdot readers out there, students, and professors would be doing a great community service by contributing to an Open Source Textbook project?
Legally I think the professors don't have a leg to stand on here. True, the lecture is a copyrighted presentation, so outright recording of voice or video for sale is definitely infringement. Analogous in my opinion to videotaping a film in the theatre and selling the tape.
However, if I go to the theatre with a legal pad and write down a scene-for-scene description of a film and later attempt to sell my account, am I violating the film's copyright? I'm not really going to be able to record much of the content - I can't get exact lines, describe costumes and cinematorgraphy in detail and so on.
Notetaking in class seems similar. I'm not photgraphing presentation slides. I can't duplicate diagrams, only imitate them. And I certainly can't get the professor's vocal inflections, gestures and so on.
That being said, I think selling notes from a lecture without the professors permission is highly immoral. The fact that it's probably legal doesn't make it right. Respect your professors and their hard work.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
On the other hand, I'm in another class where I think I may have to resort to asking other people for their notes, because what I'm getting in class isn't making a whole lot of sense. I really wish that this professor would post notes or something to help us review, because I'm very lost.
Maybe it's just me, but shouldn't professors WANT to help their students learn? Putting notes on the web sounds like a good way of this to me...
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
In my experience the term NOTE is an INTERPRETATION OF DATA that I am experiencing (or if in this case learning). I would not see a problem with this if they were taking the notes for free, but it might be an issue since they are paying for the Intellecutal Property.
SideNote: I for one am against Intellectual Property rules in general because of my adopted rule: "If a secret was meant to be kept, why did you tell your friend?" Mainly due to the fact that if you want to OWN intellectual property you should keep it hidden where noone else can see/use it so it cannot be copied or used against you.
I know I'm ranting/rambling, but I'll finish it off with this:
I feel there is no need for any complaints if this information was being given freely, however since the students are making a profit off these notes, at the very least a reference to the original source (though in reality this usually turns out to be the Professor's professor professor professor (ad nausem)) should be given.
Thanks for your patience and understanding
TENEMENT
--
--
Exactly. The notes themselves are just interpretations of whats given during the lecture, and the ideas in them are old hat (the phrase "IP" is an inherent contradiction IMO and I will not use it).
I cant see why professors would be up in arms about this. After all, it sure makes preparing for a lecture course much easier! If I ever take a lecture course (I'm a physics PhD student at the moment, so its vaguely possible) then, as well as the standard textbooks, any existing notes I can find on the web would be my starting point.
Speaking as one who has faced this issue at a different level, yes the institutions claim to own ALL the student's knowledge while they are enrolled. I have been in on the legal discussions. I do not agree with it, but I do not have the money to fight it.
While part of the institution you are intellectually drawing from your association with said institution therefore (student, janitor, or network supervisor) you are intellectually a part of the institution and can not sell any such propertity without the institution getting it's cut.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
I know many slashdotters have knee-jerk-reactions to any notion of I.P. (particularly this). So allow me to play devil's advocate for a second, though let me first preface this:
a) I believe most professors are out of touch, and are far too caught up in academia. (no I'm not going to "prove" this, *ahem* mochaone)
b) there are substancial dangers is going overboard with this notion of IP...
One huge distinction between this and other "fair use" acts, is that the professors' work is (or might) be copied word-for-word, with a turn-over of a couple hours. That being said, let me present a theoretical situation:
Let us imagine that I tape all of my professors' lectures, and employ speach recognition on my PC to post verbatim notes to the web minutes later, so that I can profit. Some of my professors are unquestionably far better than others--let us assume they're the top professors in their respective subjects (at teaching--not academia necessarily).
What happens when kids and other professors merely start copying my professors' lectures? It might harm those few excellent professors who really go the extra mile to teach their students. Namely, it'll marginalize professors who strive to improve their teaching. (e.g.: develop improved metaphors, examples, drawings, arguments, etc) These same professors might turn to publishing (already a problem, publish or perish.) as a means to justify their existence (or salary). Their printed works ARE protected on the whole, unlike these free-for-all which slashdot juniors would have. Perhaps, they'd just dumb down their lectures...
Though, admittedly, my argument is hastily constructed; the situation is not so black and white as slashdot would have it. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for and against.
It requires more thought and consideration than the mere 5 minute knee-jerk reflex that is evidenced by the majority of slashdot content. I know i'm going to be thinking about this more...
IMO, whether students have the right to sell their notes depends upon what is in their notes.
If their notes are _really_ their interpretation of the material, they have every right to sell them, for their interpretation of public information is their IP.
However, if their notes are (as most notes I have seen) merely a transcription of the lecture, then it is not their interpretation, but rather the instructor's, and thus the IP belongs to the instructor.
I think the test would come if we compare the notes taken by two students in the same course; if they are 'substantively similar', then it probably is the instructor's IP, while if they are different, I would say it is theirs.
Colin Percival
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
UCLA, the profs are civil servants of the state of California. (And grossly overpaid civil servants at that.) They don't have property rights on their lecture notes. (Lectures are the ordinary work for which the taxpayers have paid them for.) What a rediculous idea, some people are very into themselves. Next we will have the President applying for copyright on his radio speechs.
I am very confused by a lot of the postings here. They seem to imply, incredulously, that because they hand copied the notes that that make them theirs. Does that mean I can go out, buy a book, hand copy the whole thing, and then sell copies of that book?
The same things goes for the comments regarding students paying. I paid for the book, so should just be able to make copies? How does that follow.
It's very important to realize that the site isn't asking for students to write their own essays or take on lecture material. They are asking for their notes. In my stay at university, the bulk of notes were "lecture notes," those that were copied verbatum off the board. In this case there is no difference than me copying verbatum from a book. I am allowed to do so for my own purposes only, with exception to Fair Use.
I really don't understand why people here think that a student should profit and the company should profit of of the work that the professor has put into creatig that material. How can we denounce warez kiddies and commercial piracy and think this is okay?
If you learn some material, think about it, and put it into a book, then good for you. If you just copy off a board and then sell that, then how can you call that right?
-no broken link
I'm a law student and we're covering this same sort of topic right now, as it relates to copyright in my Intellectual Property class.
In a nutshell, this is my understanding of the class notes/IP situation:
As a threshold question it seems to come down to this: is the professor lecturing from notes or is the prof lecturing extemparenously (sp)? If the prof is adhering to somewhat detailed works, the notes that the students take may be classifed as derivative works because it is an "annotation, elaboration or other modification" based on "prexisting works" (here, the underlying notes) under the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. 101).
If there are no notes from which the prof. is lecturing, it's like I'm audiotaping conversations in an otherwise public place. You can't claim copyright to those words, but I can; I've reduced your speech to a means which can be reproduced and you haven't.
Hope this helps...
Student-written notes (as in the Cornell University fiasco) should be copyright the student.
(Copyright can cover organised information, but does NOT cover non-organised collections. As notes can be written in any order, and can include or omit anything the lecturer says and, indeed, include or omit anything anyone else says, as well, they are not even remotely copyrightable by the lecturer.)
Lastly, if the notes are significantly restructured and not put up verbatim, then they are no longer the original work. This is why diaries can have phone lists in the back, as they are not quoting the telephone books - which are copyright - verbatim.
IMHO, the students in any affected University should go on rent-strike, or take the Professors to court for slander.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Ok, there are two sides to this..
First the professors:
While the actual information that they teach can't be copyrighted, trademarked, claimed as intelectual property, the way that it is presented can be. If somehow, when a student takes notes, they are able to keep the presented form, then the professors may have a case. However, most notes taken that I've seen, are either point form, or notes they've made from a text book. I don't seem too many people writing down what a prof says verbatum, and unless the prof wrote the text book...
Now, on the Students side:
What they have in their notes (minus all the doodles and scribling) will be the highlights of the information that was given them.... organized how they feel like organizing it. Now all information is free, all that your doing when you buy a book, is paying for the binding, publishing and generosity of the author to put down his thoughts on the topic. However, if you take the information from a book, and credit it.. there isn't a problem... so if the notes are posted with the professors name attached to them (ie: Class: blah, Taught by Professor: Somebody) then there should be no argument at all. As well, what's to stop students from going into a chat room and talking about the class? So what if the notes are posted somewhere... that means that whoever is talking about the subject, they all have the same reference material.
Anyways, I've probably been rambling (I just think this is stupid on the Prof's side) so let me just say one more thing...
Paying for schooling isn't easy... I really don't blame students for trying to get some money for something that they are (or should be) doing anyways.
I think most professors do not care if or when students share notes. What they do care about is when corporations come in and try to make money off the notes. This is the important factor to most professors. If someone wants to give the notes away, fine. If they want to make money, at the very least have the courtesy to inform the professor about it. If he says fine, you make money. If not, well, you find another professor to leech.
Here at UCI, one of the local note-taking places is in trouble because they were selling verbatim notes without professor's permission. The professor of this class saw a student with the verbatim notes and he asked him where he got the notes. The student said he bought the notes from this company. The professor went down there and asked the clerks whether or not they had the professors permission to replicate these notes. They, of course, said that they did (and only used notes that have been authorized by the professor). Well, of course, they had no such permission. The company is in a bit of trouble now.... =)
Because this company is not under the auspices of the UC system (there is a student-govt. run notetaking place here on campus), they are currently trying to figure out what to do with them. Apparently, the professor can sue for IP violations (and is debating whether or not to do so). For people who keep an eye on the news, this is the same company that was involved in the cadaver scandal a few weeks back...great ethics at this company!
I also believe as part of conduct, it DOES indeed forbid us from taking notes and selling them without permission. IIRC, it also says that all notes and lectures are the IP of the professor (unless otherwise stated).
Later,
Justin
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
Intellectual property is a touchy issue when a professor is concerned because that's how they earn their money (by teaching also, but they wouldn't be teaching if they didn't have a bunch of publications behind them).
I understand their concern about that, but courses usually fall out of that because of the level of the courses in question. I'm pretty sure most of the courses they have on that site are low-level courses since there is a lot more people who have to take them compared to very advanced and specialised courses.
That knowledge doesn't really come from the teacher himself, but from books and what he was taught when he was a student himself. This isn't stuff that they discovered or invented usually. Then they paid for the books and for their tutions before that, but can't we say the same thing about the students? Where does a student stops using the teacher's knowledge and starts uusing his own?
Here the note-taking service is handled completely by the student associations. The note-takers are paid and everything and nobody complains (except when they make mistakes in it...). The teachers see it as being an help for studying and some review them afterward because they want their students to succeed.
The impression I get is that they want to avoid a bad precedent more than anything. If they didn't react, then people could start to take course notes and publish it in some form and say it is theirs. After all if those students can get paid from it and attach their names to those notes then they are their property, right?
Anyway, we'll see what happens afterward. Right now, I'd say the reaction is pretty standard and doesn't mean anything else than a knee-jerk reflex. If they really go ahead and try to sue them then we'll see just how low we're sinking here.
Some people have the wrong impression about what notes really are and what they can be used for. True, you can use the IDEAS you learn in a class and publish them to your heart's content, because ideas are not copyrighted. This mean that if I take CS101 from Prof. Smith, I can use the ideas he teches me and give them to others however I want. What I cannot use are the specific ways that Prof. Smith tought me the things. For instance, if Prof. Smith has a wonderful diagram which explains what recursion means, that diagram can have a copyright, which means I can't draw my own rendition of that diagram and then sell it. And if he has a really good original description or definition, and the student writes down the bulk of it verbatim and that gets published, that's also a copyright violation. I think everyone who's gone to college or ever had a teacher period knows that the words of a teacher who can explain something in a creative way are far more valuable than a teacher who just gives you facts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are they particular to a teacher. Interpretations are.
I know these online notes places require that the students not copy down pictures the teacher draws or take notes verbatim, but do you think anyone actually does that? Teachers who work hard on coming up with good lectures should be rewarded with the right to determine who can hear them. In some cases, they want to publish their notes on the web; in some cases not. Is that so wrong?
I've been to SAP training where they required signing a form of nondisclosure agrement, which I found disquieting; for public educational institutions to do this seems to me to be grounds for termination of public funding.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I suspect some of it is motivated by fear of long-term obsolescence through the commodisation of education, especially at the undergraduate level (basic maths/english doesn't change that fast). If you look at the University of Phoenix model where they separate the creation and delivery of content (I believe flat $1K/lecture) you can understand why highly paid professors want some bargining chip against the fear of being replaced by a teaching assistant with decent parroting ability. Universities are only too happy to oblige to protect their brand/reputation in order to justify their fees.
Now as to the right/wrong of this is another debatable (and contentious) point which is best left for time to resolve. Technology always has this nasty habit of destroying old practices and, despite the perception of universities as technology powerhouses, many are still accustomised to the medieval practice of mass delivery to a lecture-hall. From the professor's point of view, if there is some original and unique features in their lectures, they would prefer to capture the economic benefits through textbooks, videotapes and (autographed?) notes. Afterall, Feyman wasn't adverse to making a buck or two. One can compare the case where the composer of a song would get some (miniscule) payment for a movie songtrack though the bulk of payments would go to the singer.
The question is how many steps removed from the source can you justifiably claim some recompensate? This is a rather interesting point as it also relates to OpenSource and the reluctance of many companies to release their IP into (effectively) the public domain. If computers allow defect free copying of digital content, then limiting the original content or controlling the distribution channels is the only way of preventing the value of your original investment (in the case of universities their library infrastructure and sunk costs in faculty staff) from disipating.
Sooner or later, universities are going to get hit by the same train that has run rough-shod over the music/media industries and the sight is not going to be pretty.
LL
This kind of crap has got to stop, you do NOT have rights to something just because you said it, especially when said something is a bit of theory. Have any of these idiots heard of the term "convergence"? I will grant limited (lifetime of the author + 25 years) copywrite protection, but protecting derivitavie works? After I read/see/hear it, all of my THOUGHTS are derivative works, everything I do for the rest of my LIFE is derivative, and If you don't think so, you don't understand anything about human psychology or psychiatry. As for IP on an IDEA? I just want to scream and start shooting people, its as childish (EXACTLY as childish, in exactly the same way) as "First Posts", "I thought of it first, so there".
I cant wait to spend my declining years on the moon, were idiots like this will get spaced before their greedily shortsighted and immature views can spread to children to young to know better.
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
I have to completely agree with you. I don't care how many notes can you see, copy, read on the web, or get inside your brain trough osmosis, memorizing facts is not the best way to learn for all disciplines.
I'm explicitly leaving aside those carrers where the context is very important, like law and accounting, there yuo have to read and memorize a *lot* of stuff before you can start thinking how to solve a problem.
Understanding the abstractions involved in your clases is much more important, because in the end, almost everything that you memorized is not going to give you the most compeling competitive advantage in the workplace: Being up to date, learning to learn, show that you can do/know/have/understand something that is patricular and distinct. Have you noticed that for most of the companies, and after your first job, nobody cares where you studied?
If you want to "learn" by using someone elses notes, sorry pal, you are NOT getting the skills you need to work. Be my guest, I hope I don't find you as a coworker.
To summarize: I support the profesors on this, for me is the same as suporting *real* education instead of note-taking monkeys.
Gerry -- #include "ea!.h"
Here is a real interesting dilemma. Let's say you are attending some college, somewhere, we'll say UNIXU. Now, for an argument, you are someone relatively famous like say - CmdrTaco >;-) and you make it know at /. you are attending class A at UNIXU and - of course - you have bunch of programs you give out under GPL all the time. You learn some nifty programming technique as *part* of an assignment. You implement it under the GPL in some source, somewhere.
Now, it is VERY unlikely that someone could, but there is the possibility that they might, rip it off for the very same assignment (that's even if they could find it at all).
Is it cheating? Is it a violation of rights in any form?
The answer is -- it doesn't freaking matter, because, if I wanted to learn some great Python techniques, I might vist ESR's home page or - gee - python.org. For C _ might go and find small header files and use their source . . . you get the idea.
Now, BLATENTLY putting up code that says - HERE, USE ME TO DO YOUR HOMEWORK, is just kind of messed up in a way (although you could still cheat about a million other ways) so I don't think it is a good practice. but, putting up helpful snippets or someone taking the time to learn someone else's implementation is STILL learning.
In the end I think the debate has no substance on either side of the table.
" -- ow my brain hurts again -- "
I work for an outstanding, well-funded team of immunologists. They would be pleased to hear that understanding of their work was being facilitated to those who might not otherwise get the message. Instead of pettiness they let their record of publications speak for what is their IP. I wonder why U.C.L.A. has such problems with their record of IP
The main gripe is that they are charging for the service. If it was free of charge then it would be free and clear "true" knowledge share. Just another corp making a buck. If your frat or dorm charged money for you to look at the past notes, and exams that they had on file you can bet that if the school knew about it they'd be shut down. The profs probably don't like not getting paid but also they don't like seeing an organization other than thier own getting money for the knowledge. At least schools have scholarships. If corps take over our "education system" (training system as the case maybe) you'll be hard pressed to find them fitting scolastic betterment in on the bottom line.
There are better ways to get this info (the notes) out to people for free and still make a living. I'll leave this as an excercise to the reader.
What's wrong with ./ers?
I have to say, I'm a prof wannabe. so maybe I'm somehow bias on this issue.
As someone has point out, the prof/instructors have edit the materials to present. Although the prof/instructors seem to "pirate" others copyrighted materials, the copyright laws generally have exception clauses on the use of materials for education purpose in schools or institutions. A student copying down what have presented is included in this exception. And indeed, the prof/instructors can claim copyrights on this materials as they have edited. It's derived work.
If student sell it to others without the permission of the original copyright holders and it's not under the same exceptional clause of copyright law, that's already a violation of copyright.
Of course, you can argue whether it's appropriate to extend the copyright interpretation of derived work to this case, that's something we shouldn't overlook.
And... of course I would say, only stupid students would pay to get a copy of notes for elementary courses. You always learn more by direct interacting with professors/instructor for advanced topics that the notes do not cover normally.
A sig is redundant.
This strikes me as very strange. When I was at the U of A, the student union had a standing offer of cash for quality notes, which they would package, publish, and sell to students during the next term. Guess its an American thing...
Intolerant people should be shot.
There are a lot more Notes sites like these, one studentu was on CBS a while ago arguing with a professor about who owns the rights. They're pushing that the Notetakers are a lot like news reporters, they write their interpatation on what the professor says. I'm gonna look for some more links to the articles.
Generators of other content types (Music, Movies) are now trying to get into the same thing which would lead to a pay per view model as soon as they get their technology straight. Divx was a failed attempt at this but we'll see more.
Soon authors of books will also want into the pay per view scheme of things, and also, it seems, university professors.
Once you hit that slippery slope, where does it end? If you follow this to its logical and absurd conclusion, teaching a child the alphabet will violate someone's intellectual property as will any educational effort from kindergarden on up. Once you hit the workforce, will you have to pay your professors licensing fees for the use of the intellectual property they've revealed to you. Will you have to sign a non-compete contract before you are accepted to college? Will you have to pay royalty fees to your teachers when you publish a paper? Exactly where will this insanity end?
Someone needs to take a beatdown stick to these idiots.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The concept is that in the case of a student, the scope of knowledge is too limited to contain enough new content to be anything other than a mild derivative.
In the case of art, there is a percentage of difference which must exist before a derivative is considered to be beyond copyright infringement.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
Those who can do, those who can't teach. With a few noted exceptions.
It would seem to me that the intellectual property in a classroom that a prof (and therefore the teaching institution) could claim ownership of would be the style inwhich the prof/school convey their lessons.
The notes produced by student based on public domain lesson content (ie, 2+2=4) would seem to me to be the intellectual property of the student. Whereas the actual lesson content (2+2=4) remains public domain.
Actually, this all gets kind of ridiculous. Everything you know was taught to you through instruction or example. Should Bill Gates' mom claim intellectual property on his brain (and therefore business ideas) because she gave birth to him? Where do you draw the line?
Speak truth to power.
Universities are created to spread information and I think most professors find that notion fundamental to their value system.
It sounds like the university wants to cover it's asets but can a university really get anywhere if the professors would argue that the intilectual propterty is not theirs?
I heard about this a couple of days ago on NPR. There was mention that professors were being told that they should copyright their lectures so that publishing them would constitute a copyright violation.
IMHO, IANAL, etc. etc., but unless you tape the lecture, type up an accurate transcript, and post it on this Web site, I cannot see how your lecture's being copyrighted helps the professor. Unless your students are the fastest damn note takers on the planet, they're not going to get the lecture down verbatim. Paraphrasing isn't a copyright violation as far as I remember.
All in all, I think this is pretty overblown. Unless the professor is the worst in the University, his students are going to get more out of the lectures than they will reading the transcripts. Of course, the prof's gotta lose the attitude that ``my time is too important to spend it talking with students, and my office hours aren't for discussions about class'', etc. Clowns like that should lose their tenure (tenure's supposed to protect academic freedom, not protect some anti-social boor dressed in tweed -- but that's another question altogether, eh?). My wife's currently struggling through a C class taught by a guy who, apparently, has too much else to do than prepare a decent lecture. She gets a lot more from the textbook. I doubt that transcripts of his lectures would be too helpful if found on the Web. (heh, heh)
[All of this, of course, reminds me of the old joke about the professor who was teaching a senior-level/first-year-grad course for the first time and asked another professor how to tell the seniors from the grad students. The answer was ``When you go in the first day, say 'Good morning!'. The seniors will reply back; the grad students will have already written it down.'']
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
a) a large number of professors get round to writing books on the courses they teach
:-)
b) in order to do this they either
i) read other textbooks and decide how to organise their own i.e. make notes
ii) refer to their own notes taken from lectures they attended and put them in their textbook.
If they do not write books, then they adopt a similar approach to deciding how to structure their own lectures and their own lecture notes may take from these sources.
If UCLA is correct about copyright on notes, which are a students own interpretation of a professors lectures, then breach of copyright would pertain in both the above cases too.
I believe UCLA is being extremely silly about this
- the amount of money involved has got to be small
- on the other hand if someone manages to sell 100,000+ copies of the notes then they should ask for a share of the royalties
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Someone above noted that one major reason institutions of higher education might oppose services like Versity and the other note-taking sites is that they are in effect opening their class rooms to anyone with a web connection.
This doesn't really matter though, in terms of any loss of prestige for that institution. I could be going to Podunk U., reading notes from Uptight and Ivy, maybe gaining insights that a student at that "prestigious" college is getting. But its degrees employers look at, and I still have a degree from Podunk U., so the Uptight and Ivy "brand" is not diluted or harmed in any way...
This sort of behavior from some leading institutions is rather depressing, since it only reinforces my feeling that perhaps many colleges are just trying to make a quick buck on you.
These note services are also no substitution for going to class, but if you miss class one day and don't know anybody to get the notes from, or you might have a quiz or something and you need the notes, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to logon and get the notes you would have had anyway. And I would think that professors would be glad to be able to spread what they know to anyone interested in learning...
;)
Just my two cents,
MadProfessor
(nope, I'm not a professor in real-life,
the name just has a nice ring to it
There's a company that's been in business for years in State College called Nittany Notes. They hire students to take notes for $5.00 a class, and sell the notes, by class or semester. They copy the typed up notes on red paper to boot to make it harder to reproduce. Penn State has sued and lost. Professors have sued and lost. The rulings have all come down that notes that the students take are an intrepretation of the professors lecture and therefore remain the intellectual property of the student and they can do what they want with them. It's actually got to the point at Penn State that if a professor really objects to the note-taking-for-profit model, they hand out all the notes at the beginning of the semester and copyright them. The result is the same... students get the notes they want... -- mapman
However, why do we go to school? It's not for the facts - pretty much everything you can get at a school is attainable over the Internet, through a 3rd party, or by purchasing the text books used.
We go to school for the lectures and one-on-one instruction, not to mention the group-type activities. There are certain things that can't be gained from reading a book - or in this case, notes.
I see these notes merely as a way for diligent students to get extra money and for slacking students to get more concise (than the texts) information concerning what the test will be about. (Everyone gets good grades.)
It's possible that, in turn, this makes the professor think the material is too easy (everyone gets a good grade) and the course gets too difficult. Everyone looses.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
OK, obviously, people are selling their notes. But who here would do that? I have often found that "geeks" are often very big on "earning" knowledge. I can't imagine many of us here, after busting our cans and taking good notes would then hand those over to someone else so they could leech off of our efforts.
I'm speaking from experience here. In High School, I was one of the top computer science students in our program. My teacher used the same basic materials from year to year. She would change the tests, but the basic questions remained the same--almost exactly the same. Enter my brother, one year behind me. He asks to look at my class notes and finds a treasure trove--I had every class, every quiz, every program, every test. I loved this stuff, so my notes where very thorough. Suddenly, my brother started getting 100's on his pascal tests. He had the tests before he went in; it was no contest.
And no learning was taking place. I'm sure he would say he was learning, but I knew he wasn't. Plus it pissed me off that all my hardwork was subsidizing his grades. I'm sure many of you would identify. I'm all for helping others; I tutor many people. But I'm against people taking shortcuts and trying to circumvent the learning process.
Some of you would argue that my brother learned by looking at my tests and notes. That would be wrong. Call me a jerk, but I went to my comp sci teacher and matter-of-factly told her about what my brother was doing. She wasn't mad at my brother; more mad at herself. So she took the next test and worded the True/False questions almost identically to the original tests--except they were opposite. My brother bombed the next test.
He was pissed with me, but I told him he would have to do the work himself. He did so so, for a while, all the while pissed at me for spoiling his perfect plan. He went on to do very well after a few more weeks. But he worked a lot harder for it than he had before.
People should do their own work. Everyone has a right to do what they want with their notes (I think the college's are wrong here). But it bothers me that anyone would choose to sell their notes so that someone else could basically cheat their way through a class.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
It might actually convice people to pay attention in class. Wouldn't that be ironic?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So where does it stop? Next High school teachers and grade school teachers etc will want to copyright all the notes taken by students at these education levels. I though teachers were encouraging students to use the internet to do research or homework assignments. I thought they were trying to encourage teamwork whereby they would IRC chat or email others in other schools (or the same) to help each other out. The only place that academic standards should be aherred to, is plagerzing writings, and exams.
This sounds quite similar to the argument that you can patent a particular piece of software, but not the idea of what the software does. And since I agree with this, I have to agree with you. Touche!
And now you've made me question my whole philosophy, because where speech is concerned I'd have thought there was more value worth protecting in the idea than in the words. But now, saying it to myself, that sounds spooky and totalitarian. Is the idea only valuable if it's shared?
Curse you for turning my mind into goo!
I think academia is full of bullshit in many places. But to say professors are grossly overpaid is a mistake. Compare their salary relative to other professionals in their field. Consider the costs of obtaining a Phd (including forgone wages), then consider the "risks". I know most professors would actually be richer had they invested the money that went towards their education in the stock market wisely. Or did you know that there are something like 2 million PhDs in the US who can't find employment (or full-employment atleast)?
You don't know anything. Who was it that made the current technological revolution possible? College professors. Anyone who thinks that the best and the brightest go into industry and "do" is living in a hole in the ground. And the notion that College professors just teach and don't accomplish anything is equally absurd. The majority of college professors, at least in the large universities are primarily researchers, who, in fact, often found companies, if they feel it wouldn't interfere with their more important work.
>so if I take a class on C programming, I can't
:), but my own policy for my classes is that I will sue any publisher that doesn't have prior permission to print them. On the other hand, I also provide my lecture slides in advance--with lots of white space for writing--as I see no point in students simply scribbling down rather than paying attention.
>use what I learned in that class to write and
>sell a book on C programming?
This is second hand (I haven't verified it, but it is repeated throughout economics department), but supposedly Varian's first edition of "Microeconomic Analysis" was, err, a little too close to the course he took--that is, taken heavily from his own class notes. The end result: royalties on the first edition, and a second edition taken from scratch.
>Copyright may protect the text of a lecture
>itself, but no way does it prevent a student from
>expressing the content of a lecture in his or her
>own way.
These are two different things. The content is the information. Notes are a representation of the lecture itself.
>And I don't see how a restriction
>that class notes are not to be used for profit
>can possibly be upheld - after all, I might be
>taking that class so I can get a profitable job
>using what I learned...and I might just refer
>back to those class notes.
Again, that's different than publishing the notes.
I'm certainly not going to jump into the middle of the fray on this (about as smart as getting into a discussion as to why the GPL isn't free
A student's notes may end up containing copyrighted material. Not just material which the professor maybe able to claim copyright on but also material which the professor got permission to use for purposes of that class and withen that class alone. If students start selling what they take down verbatim from the black board or from the overhead projector then the professor may get in trouble for violating licensing conditions on the materials he uses in class. Hence, if students insist on being able to resale their notes then they may lose out on commerical material (certain tables, charts, translations of texts, summeries) just will not be available to the professor for teaching the class.
In my experience the students who are the most diligent note takers are also the ones with the poorest grasp of the material: if I just write down everything that appears on the blackboard, and if I can memorize it and regurgitate enough of it on the exam, maybe just maybe I can get a B! Oh please let me get a B!
Test 1 2 3 4