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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. "
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.
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.
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.
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 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. =)
>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