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Censorship

CA Legislature Passes Ban On Sale Of Lecture Notes 195

Posted by timothy from the try-enforcing-this-via-RIAA dept.
Misch writes: "On September 22, the legislature of the state of California has passed a ban on the commercial distribution of lecture notes. Needless to say, there are going to be some definite free speech issues to be played out here. "This lecture is copyrighted by the Board of Regents of the State of California, and is intended for the sole use of a student sitting in the classroom. All images, sounds and ideas presented may not be re-used without the express written consent of Major League Baseball." Text of the bill here. And, of course, there's the people in favor of the ban."

Interestingly, part of the explanatory text of the bill points out that "[e]xisting case law provides that in the absence of evidence of agreement to the contrary, a teacher, rather than the institution for which he or she teaches, owns the common law copyright to his or her lectures." That does seem to make some sense, but are notes "the lecture"? If I draw a sketch of a painting, does the original artist own my sketch, too? (Or in this case, does the University of California?)

If "commericial" distribution is prohibited, what about non-commericial? If this spreads to Texas, I know a few businesses on Austin's Drag that would have to quickly rethink their operations. Absent rigorous NDAs, is it fair to restrict the information in a lecture? A video or audio recording is one thing, but notes are by their nature different from the original lecture. Sharing lecture notes is not akin to "sharing" term papers or stealing tests. Wouldn't this be akin to declaring that a reader is not allowed to summarize the content of a book he borrows from the library, or purchases outright?

Gnutella Gnotes, anyone?
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CA Legislature Passes Ban On Sale Of Lecture Notes More

CA Legislature Passes Ban On Sale Of Lecture Notes

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  • Are they trying to say that people who put lecture notes on the web are against babies? People who like babies won't put lecture notes on the web?

    What the fuck! We're paying $30,000 a year for this, you damn right we're gonna do what we want with it. Fair friggin use!

    Quick, someone say something intelligent? My guess is, all the people who whine about it who are from California didn't bother to let their legislators know their feelings?
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057

  • You've gotta be kidding... (Score:5)

    by mbadolato ( 105588 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @11:55AM (#725221)
    I would think that there is going to be a hell of a protest about this.

    Notes taken during a class are basically just the note-taker's paraphrase of what's said. It isn't copyrighted material! Since when isn't someone allowed to write about something, and sell their work (if they desire)?

    I mean, a ruling that basically says "I'm special.. what I say in front of this group of people, within these 4 walls, belongs to me and no one else. Bwahahahaha)

    What about if a fellow student is absent, can notes be shared with them? What if they need to pay for the paper that the copy of the notes is written on, does that violate the ruling?

    *sigh*

  • Whole new twist on press conferences... (Score:3)

    by syates21 ( 78378 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @11:56AM (#725222)
    I can see it now. By the same "logic" applied in this bill, the next time a politician lies, calls someone an a**hole, etc at a press conference, they can just say "Sorry, I own the copyright to that quote and you can't reproduce it without my express written permission"

    Isn't the whole point of universities to share knowledge anyway?

    And just who do those stupid regents of the UC system think is footing the bill for all those classes anyway? It sure isn't them.

  • New recording format: "Learning" (Score:3)

    by rkent ( 73434 ) <rkent@post.ha r v a r d . edu> on Friday October 06, 2000 @11:56AM (#725223)
    Wouldn't this be akin to declaring that a reader is not allowed to summarize the content of a book he borrows from the library, or purchases outright?

    Right. And doesn't it also, logically, prohibit you from using your learned information in a commercial way? What about if I learn how to code linked lists in class, and then tell a coworker how to do that at my internship? Oops!

    Of course, this is meant to prohibit those places that sell lecture notes back to students, a ban which I'd more or less agree with. But it doesn't seem written in quite the right way.

  • Does anyone actually buy these? (Score:5)

    by sheckard ( 91376 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @11:56AM (#725224) Homepage
    Free speech issues aside, does any student actually buy these notes? I never have, but then again, I've never really skipped more than a couple classes per semester. Evidently there's a market for these, since you see those shops everywhere, but I don't know a single person who's actually bought notes.

    Most of the lecture-type classes I've taken a service like this would be completely useless since they normally put a copy of their notes in the library after class anyway. As a matter of fact, that would be a good way of combating this... just have the prof dump his notes in the library and make them available to students at the cost of copying... whether it's done by hand or for 5c a page from the copier. Just eliminate the market for them and you eliminate the problem.
  • Thi smakes sense in a twisted sort of way (thats not to say that I agree with it; but I am not a copyright supporter anyway)

    The lecure itself is copyright the teacher. The notes however are written by the student. However, the notes are derived from the original work (the lecture).

    So thus, as a derivitive work, the original author would still have copyright. This would be like distributing your own "Garfeild" cartoons. The artist who made garfeild has copyright on the character...so unless you are making a parody (which would be fair use), or using it to teach a class (again fair use),distributing it is copyright infringement.

    Of course, this assumes that no substantial value was added by the student. That would complicate things.

    Of course IANAL; but I have read the FAQs and other stuff at the Copyright office website. They go into some (but not much) detail on these subjects.

    -Steve
  • Is it true that theoretically I could drive a boat out the international waters and broadcast this stuff? "See that boat there. They're broadcasting Standford law lectures with implied oral consent not expressed written consent... or so the legend goes."
  • are test preparation services like Kaplan and the like. I don't think it is wring to study for the SAT or GRE or LSAT, however I know from personal experience that these services don't care at all about what the client knows. Their whole thing is bringing up the score so that person can get into med school or law school. In addition, people who don't want to or can't afford to take the class are faced with an artificially inflated median. (I didn't take test prep for the LSAT because I figured I wouldn't want to go to law school if I wasn't able to command logic)

    I don't know about you, but it doesn't make me happy to know that my doctors may have gotten into med school based on their ability to take a test prep course rather than their normal abilities. (yes I know that standardized tests aren't true measurements of knowledge etc. but it is the way it is).

    To me, that is a lot worse than using lecture notes. I bet more people could honestly say they use lecture notes in addition to class or to find out about a class than people who could honestly say they use Napster only for non-copyrighted works and isn't "fair use" what it is all about?

    After all students are paying for those lectures in the first place.

    Tony

  • but hey... who wants to see me hit some poppers?!

    Actually I think this is fair. They're talking about *commercial* resources. If you a) aren't going to class b) don't make friends that might give you some notes c) want some sort of advantage over other students... etc... then maybe you shouldn't go. Sorry.

    ----

  • I'm no lawyer... but does this make sense:
    I pay my tuition to pay for my prof's salary, and he gives me the service of his lectures. That kinda makes him my 'employee' (in a very general sense). Don't I have a right to everything he said? I did help pay for his salary when he lectured, right?

    Is this a valid? Like I said before, I'm no lawyer... far from one...


    -- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's .sigs??
  • When I was at the University of Texas I had some professors who would throw the commercial note takers out of the class, and others who would bring them down to the front row so he could make sure they got everything he said. I even had one professor who claimed he bought a copy of the notes, because they were better than what his originals.

    I was there "before" the web, so I haven't looked to see if the note taking services have websites yet. Studying for an exam at 3am it sure would be tempting to enter a credit card number at website and get the notes for that day I had dozed off...

    I don't really see what the problem selling lecture notes is, being firmly .edu I think attribution is very important, and the notes obviously retain attribution. What use would lecture notes be if the course and professor weren't listed?

  • I don't see this as a problem! (Score:5)

    by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear.pacbell@net> on Friday October 06, 2000 @12:00PM (#725231) Homepage
    This seems to be the relevent passage:

    CHAPTER 6.5. UNAUTHORIZED RECORDING, DISSEMINATION, AND
    PUBLICATION OF ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES

    66450. (a) Except as authorized by policies developed in
    accordance with subdivision (a) of Section 66452, no business,
    agency, or person, including, but not necessarily limited to, an
    enrolled student, shall prepare, cause to be prepared, give, sell,
    transfer, or otherwise distribute or publish, for any commercial
    purpose, any contemporaneous recording of an academic presentation in
    a classroom or equivalent site of instruction by an instructor of
    record. This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium,
    including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten
    class notes.

    It never mentions that a non-commercial entity cannot distribute said materials; it specifically mentions "commercial purpose" as part of the restriction. A lawyer, of course, is free to correct my interpretation.

    Another point to defend this is the fact that it mentions "contemporaneous recording" in which it means, IIRC, any recording made at the time of the lecture/presentation.

    So distributing handwritten notes(not teacher's notes!) should be okay(except perhaps for the fact that your own copyright is being violated when someone else is distributing your notes), unless that counts as a "contemporaneous recording", though it is lossy, full of interpretation, and not authored at all by the professor/lecturer.

    Another point is that the information handed out was not under NDA, for the most part, so any notes one has taken, under free speech and other statutes, is fair game for distribution. They are distributing their own works, and not that of the institution, lecturer, or professor.

    IANAL!

    The nick is a joke! Really!
  • The problem I see with this bill is as follows:

    It would seem to me that a student enrolled in a course has a right to the information contained in the lecture.

    If a student misses a lecture, he/she must be able to get access to the lectures content by *some* means - a friends notes, a note-taking service, an audio-recording, or professor supplied notes.

    Friends are unreliable. Audio-recordings usually require friends. It would seem to me then, that if commercial ventures are outlawed, then the professor or institution should have to provide the content (post lecture).

    Most of my professors (actually, I can't even think of any exceptions) provided notes (god pless .ps), but there are many disciplines (Bio, English) that don't. This bill could effectively take away a students right to that lecture material.

    Perhaps the bill should be re-worded in such a way that the onus is on the student or note-service not to buy/sell material for a presentation he was not originally allowed to attend?
  • If I pay to attend a speaking engagment, listen to the the speaker (let's say it's the presidential candidates for arguments sake), then afterwards write about their talk for my job (oh yeah, pretend I work for a newspaper), isn't that the same thing?

    Pay to get in, summarize what they say, write it up, sell it...

  • Notes vs. recordings (Score:3)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Friday October 06, 2000 @12:00PM (#725234) Homepage Journal
    When I attended my freshman orientation in 1986 at Michigan State University, one of the speakers specifically said that we needed to get permission from the professor before any tape recording was done in the classroom. The reason was that the professor owned the copyright to the actual lecture. On the other hand, he said that written notes, provided they were not a verbatim transcript of the lecture, were our property and we did not need to get permission to take or share our notes.
  • Have you ever been in college? My experience is that the professor/TA has pretty clear notes, and that most lectures are merely them copying their notes onto an overhead or chalkboard, all the students copy that as closely as possible into notebooks, and that's it. Maybe a question/asnwer session, a little verbal jousting about exactly what's going to be on the exam. On the other hand, this is just the continued erosion of any rights one has a student, since no one seems to question this, even in college. We're already sliding down the slope at a very high rate of speed, so just consider this proper preparation for today's students for today's employment world with it's numerous NDAs, non-competes, and employee surveillance.
  • If my friend and I are in a class, and she takes much better notes than I, would it then be illegal for me to pay her (her to accept money) to take notes for me?

    Would she be a note-prostitute?
  • I have just copyrighted any and all coments made by user: "annonomous coward" no portion of these coments may be read, discussed, glanced at or reproduced without my express permision. Furthermore these coments may not be moderated down without a written letter of intent by the moderator involved. failure to folow these rules will result in shaving your cat.

  • <sigh> This isn't something that legislature can easily decide... I'm in college, and I believe that I should be able to sell notes that I take in lecture. There are some problems that do have to be considered though, like how this impacts things like grades and participation. I wouldn't sell notes for the purposes of giving a elite few with money a chance to get grades that they don't deserve, but I don't know how lecture notes without the lecture would really help even. What if the consequences of letting students sell notes is to cause a general increase of the level of education of the populace, because the people buying the lecture notes probably wouldn't have learned except by what the are learning by reading the notes of someone who is probably a lot more intelligent and observant? I would like to see figures on how the committees researched the need and consequences of the law, becuase there are potential side-effects that they might not have even considered.

    Some of my professors didn't want notes and other information being exchanged between students or students and outside parties, and if they caught a student doing such a penalty could be expulsion from the class. Some teachers, however, encouraged it. I have a professor right now who actually asked if anyone wanted to take notes for $75, because there was a student that was not going to be around to take them herself. I don't see this being a bad thing, but if it's not permitted, then students who need such help may not be able to get it. I don't think that legal statutes will help the matter at all.

  • I really don't understand why professors would dislike this. Someone is providing their class with study aids and they don't have to lift a finger.

    As far as copyright infringement goes, I think that's a litle silly too. The only financial benefit received is from tuition. Are students going to stop drop out of university and buy the notes online instead? The whole point of lecture notes and education is to spread the information. What does the medium matter?

    Ideally, "perfect" testing would discourage students from skipping class. If the class is really providing a benefit, then the results should be reflected in the tests. If students can do just as well on the tests without the class, then either the test is flawed, or the class is not worthwhile.

  • Unless the notes specifically amount to a transcript or outline of the lecture (some students admittedly do take notes this way), the school ought to be able to claim no rights over the notes.

    It's certainly sick when the ideas (which are generally speaking public domain) expressed in the lecture themselves are considered the intellectual property of the school, just because that's where you happened to get them from.

    Of course, I suppose there is precedent for this treatment of public domain content -- companies who sell access to databases have been lobbying for IP "protection" for public domain content extracted from their databases for a long time.

    Let's say I become a teacher... is my alma mater going to start demanding royalties?

  • This does not prohibit me from puttin any notes I take up on the web for free. If you buy the notes because you're not going to class, chances are you'll be out of the school pretty fast. If you are buying notes because you prefer not to take any, then that is fine. You should be able to find friends to share notes with you if you go to class, though.
  • This just proves what a sham organized education is. The whole intent to educating people is so that they will be more knowledgeable. It doesn't matter if people go to class or not as long as they know the material. How can institutes be upset at students learning? That's the bottom line: it doesn't matter *how* the students learn. I find it ironic though that with the internet booming there are universities who not only don't take advantage of it for teaching, but rather censor it's use. Does anyone else find that backwards?
  • Well isn't using the knowledge at the job i get after i graduate using the material for financial gain?
  • Don't these people get it? The more you ban something the more people desire it. I forsee elaborate warez channels funneling this stuff around universities, etc. Why is it they figure banning something will stop it?
  • Jim Davis owns the Trademark on the Garfield characters. He may or may not own the copyright of a particular strip, but it is the (TM) that keeps you from distributing your own Garfield(TM) cartoons.
  • I'm sure this issue is going to get lots of responses by students who see selling their notes as a god-given right. Isn't not that simple. I think the recording TV analogy works quite well. If you're going to get home late and miss the Simpsons, you tape it and watch it later. If you friend missed it too, you loan him the tape. Nothing wrong with that. There's also nothing wrong with taking notes and passing them around to your slacker friends who missed class.

    But what if you actually sold your notes? Suppose you taped all the episodes of the Simpsons and duplicated them thousands of times, and sold them at a hefty profit. Is that right? The value of the tapes isn't the effort you made in duplicating them, it is in the contents. You are making a profit off of someone else's work. Similarly, if you photocopy your notes and sell them to people, the value of your notes is not in the effort you made in copying the contents of the blackboard. It is in the content of the notes.

    I don't know about the legal issues, but the moral issues are pretty clear. Making a profit off of someone else's work without giving the creator any recompense is wrong. Helping out your friends is right. I know that if my students took good notes in my classes and then put them on the internet for anyone to download I'd be thrilled. If my students made money off of my lectures, or some company made money by selling the notes, I'd be pissed.

  • And just who do those stupid regents of the UC system think is footing the bill for all those classes anyway? It sure isn't them

    I'm pretty sure I'm being suckered, but... It is them. Even with the tuition hikes of the last decade, the state still pays more than the students.

    The funny thing is, in the CS department at UC Irvine, most professors

    • give out their notes,
    • sell them for the cost of the copies, or
    • post them on the web
  • I can't believe that this won't be challanged (and beaten) in court by one of those commercial bussinesses.

    Whas the big deal anyway. In order to get credit for a class you have to pay for it. Who cares if I actually go to the lectures?

    --tim

  • Further more, in a perfect world, W. wouldn't loose customers due to rival drug dealers. But this is reality, so we appreciate CIA support to get rid of them.

  • Re:Does anyone actually buy these? (Score:4)

    by mmmmbeer ( 107215 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @12:12PM (#725250)
    I can't really prove anything, but I do know that there are quite a few of these businesses around the Ohio State campus. Many of them work with teachers to sell required class materials, but lots of them just hire students to take notes and then sell copies of those notes. Unless these companies are all just fronts for money-laundering schemes, I'd say it must be a viable business model.

    What I don't understand is whom this is hurting. It's not like the teachers are being cheated; if they want to sell their notes themselves, they'll pretty much always beat the competition. They just need to make buying their notes a class requirement (I had teachers who did that). And if they're worried about students relying on the notes and not taking classes, screw 'em! If you think you can get through college just by reading someone else's notes and skipping class, you deserve to fail. On the other hand, having notes available to read before you get to a topic in class, and to mark up with your own notes during class, can be really helpful to students. I guess I just don't see how this bill benefits anyone. (I tried to look at the page in favor of it, but it's /.ed. Go Figure.)
  • i ran a "research company" for several years selling original essays and compiling lecture notes. this legislation is a joke. it is a total violation of free speech. besides, what about the student's rights, the student who pays for their education, to share the information they pay to acquire, with whomever they choose? i don't remember signing an NDA before gym class!

    1. The Meaning of Life [mikegallay.com]

  • Their whole thing is bringing up the score so that person can get into med school or law school.

    Well, the problem is not really the test-prep courses, but rather the tests themselves.

    What are standardized tests really testing for anyway? If they're used as admissions criteria, then the answer should be "potential for success at school X" or "potential for furthering school X's goals." But these things are very amorphous. How do you test for that?

    Needless to say, ETS will point you at their applicable test, probably citing statistics correlating success on the test and success of the student. If the test is a "perfect measure" then an admissions test preparation course is actually preparing a student for the school.

    I don't see anything wrong with that :)

  • Sounds to me like you went to a piss-poor college, or took only the classes intended for athletic scholarship idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudents. When I was in college, if I stepped into a class like the one you describe, my next step was out the door. You really should have demanded more from your professors.
  • so unless you are...using it to teach a class, distributing it is copyright infringement.

    What if I teach a commercial(on my part) class simply by giving people a copy of my notes after they pay a fee? It seems to me that this whole thing would fall under fair use of a copyrighted work. Why would you want to give out lecture information if you were not attempting to teach someone or a class?
  • Similar to someone working for a company, and the company claiming rights to their work, students should claim rights to the information they pay for.
    Although they can NOT claim ownership of the information, they can claim joint ownership of that particular presentation.
    However I can not see how they can lose ownership of related property they create.

    That would be akin to presenting an idea at work, then when your employeer comes up with a product based on that idea, claiming ownership of it too.

  • Isn't the whole point of universities to share knowledge anyway?

    Umm...actually, no it's not.
    [rant-sarcasm]
    I posed that same question/ideal to some professors I was doing work for, and they responded that, in fact, universities and other entities of "higher learning" are there to teach people how to learn. You read correctly, you are there to learn how to learn. You see, once you graduate (that is if you choose to not go on to an academic career, as that would allow the school to charge you even more money for the same classes that undergrads take) it is expected that those people who choose to employ you will give you the training to do the job they want you to do. If you actually spent time learning useful things that you could apply to the "real world", then the people that employ you would have to spend even more time de-programming the awful things (such as freedom in many forms) that you got to learn about in the "unfettered" enviros of the wonderful academic institution that you attened for many years.
    [/rant-sarcasm]

  • A professor's lectures are his tools of trade. (Score:3)

    by Nanookanano ( 213568 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @12:20PM (#725257)
    Intellectual property is a slippery subject, indeed. But my father was an English professor for forty years. His lectures were his constructions, built out of his own observations and the lectures of those before him. And, he always cited respectfully. If students would treat the material with respect and cite properly all this legal hoorah would not be necessary. "Settle your differences before you get to court. For, if you go to court, neither of you will get what you want." (From some old book I read once.)
  • Are they trying to say that people who put lecture notes on the web are against babies?

    Commercial distribution of lecture notes. If it's posted up there in general, it's fair use. I think they're trying to say that selling the notes of the lecture is like selling the creative
  • We can go one farther.
    My younger brother is paid, by his university, to take notes, on behalf of another student with a disability.

    Glad it isnt in California.
  • sorry... hit the submit button too soon...

    As I said, selling the creative works of the professor. I'm not exactly sure how "derivitave work" applies in this case.
  • I wonder how well some of these lecture notes correlate to the text book. Heck, I had a few profs who almost read from the book. (This was the minority, however.)
  • If you can redistribute your notes, does this mean that lecturers that attend lectures cannot come back and teach what they have learned? They are after all getting paid for teaching, making it commercial.
  • Isn't the whole point of universities to be a subsidized source of new technology and fresh ideas that can then be whored to commercial interests who can patent them and make them proprietary?

  • Two quarters ago, I was paid by the University of California to take notes for another student, who had a disability. It seems to me that this would violate that new law. So maybe UC would be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities act?

  • For the most part I agree with you. But what happens in say, a history class. Pretty much everything the professor blurts out is a fact. I'm pretty sure facts can't be copyrighted, unless the prof. adds some sort of cause/effect analysis of his own creation. What happens then? And if the notes were sold, how could a professor prove that they were a derivative of his original work?

    I don't know how these note selling sites operate, but what if they sell them generically by topic rather than the specific class they came from. Whether you go to school in California or elsewhere notes on Freud's theories are notes on Freud's theories.

    It will probably turn out to be one of those laws that's rarely enforced. If you're interested in fair use/copyright/intellectual property info the University of Texas (no I don't go there) has a decent site with some general rules of them. It can be found here [utsystem.edu]. Wigs
    --If we eliminate intellectual property, then intellectuals will have no property. Where have we seen that before?

  • No you havent.
    Yes they may.
    Yes they may and probably will.
    No it wont.

  • It is a God-given right. If God didn't want you to have the ability to sell notes that you took, it would be impossible. (nb that other times God desires you to forgo certain rights He granted, like working on the Sabbath)

    The issue is whether or not it's legal. Copyrights are not, and never have been natural rights, though monied copyright-holders have been spreading disinformation to that effect for centuries.
  • If bans on distributing lecture notes were around in ancient Greek times, we probably wouldn't have any of the works that we refer to as being "by Aristotle". Well...ok, I don't know that those were commercially distributed...

    Look at it this way: what if I wrote up an article about a speech made by a politician at a closed setting? Would that be infringing on copyright? What's the difference?

  • I bought the lecture notes (Score:3)

    by dan501 ( 223225 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @12:27PM (#725269) Homepage
    Not everyone learns the same way and not everyone gets the same things out of school.

    I didn't skip very many classes either. But I rarely took comprehensive notes. I got a lot more out of classes by paying more attention to the gist of the lecture than diverting my attention into writing down highlights.

    I enjoyed the lectures more and I learned more. Perhaps I could have scored higher on tests by ferretting out lecture highlights and paying more dogmatic attention. But I chose to enjoy learning as well as try to assimilate the knowledge into my personality rather than just fair well academically.

    Back in high school, when studying for a test, I found it very useful to read through a classmate's notes in addition to my own. Reading someone else's perspective on the lecture often gave me insight into what the teacher was saying that I wouldn't have gotten from my perspective alone.

    So I don't think that the answer is in restricting the dissemination of lecture notes.

    I think the best solution is to have the university itself sell and profit from the lecture notes. Maybe tuition could be lowered a little.

  • ..it prohibits a lecturer from making a commercial enterprises based on his own lectures. It also throws into disarray the idea of making programs for broadcast on any station that isn't explicitly not-for-profit.
    There isn't even a fair-use or reporting provision.
  • This seems to allow for any sort of notes which condense the content of the class in terms of the field without actually being directly from the instructor.

    For example, if the instructor covers the war of 1812 with a heavy emphasis on linear equations, you could easily distribute a booklet that described all of the relavent points from the war, and linear equations with time-key indexes to indicate which secations would have been covered on which days.

    If the teacher had a slant on the topic (e.g. felt that such equations were NOT the key to victory, as previosly thought, but were in fact tangential to success), you could point out that that point of view is held by some professors, and call out the particular course as an example.

    This sort of second-hand analysis is certainly not covered by the law, and is legal in every other aspect of business that I'm aware of.

    If, on the other hand, the goal of the law is to prevent people from passing tests after skipping class then a) it's a bad law and b) it will never work, no matter how you word it. These are college kids we're talking about. They're the single largest concentration of creative energy on the planet, and if you try to stop them, you will lose. Luckily for the powers that be, they can be easily distracted with shiny things....

    Lawyers: thoughts?
  • The student enrolled has a right to that information?

    I dunno, maybe I'm seeing it differently. Isn't it a priviledge that the student has access to the information?

    I would think that millions of students miss classes, and somehow still get notes, from the TAs, the profs, their friends, etc. This bill makes sense in that it explicitly states that the lecturer/prof has the rights to their work, and that without his or her consent, no one can use their work commercially. This is about the presentation and lecture, and any recordings of them, and not specifically about notes taken during class. I imagine those are fair game, and the rights are assigned to the note-taker, and not the prof, at that point.

    The nick is a joke! Really!
  • Any class that had lecture notes when I was in college was one of those 450 student monsters where the prof just recited what you would have learned had you read the required reading anyhow. By banning lecture notes, you keep students from discovering just how useless the lectures (and often the classes themselves) are...

  • Ok, so this law is intended to ensure that professors retain control over their teaching materials--it's not transferring copyright to the Board of Regents as suggested. Specifically, the law says-

    Nothing in this chapter is intended to change existing law as it pertains to the ownership of academic presentations.

    That said, it still looks like a bad law, rooted--once again--in the silly notion that ideas are a scarce resource. This one is a little more obviously bad than most, but only because the material it is protecting is more obviously intended for sharing. I mean, come on, it's a school--are we really supposed to believe that students shouldn't apply the ideas encountered to other parts of their lives? Or maybe we should think that students shouldn't use what they learn at school to make money?

    This won't go away until people are making more money from sharing ideas than they do from hoarding them. When that happens, the balance of political power will shift away from the copyright holders and to the information consumers--right where it should be today. There are several ways this could happen; the open source movement is the best example so far although there are signs of similar trends in other industries.

    daniel

  • Why (Score:1)

    by Casca ( 4032 )
    What I want to know is, why? What the hell difference does it make? Are they just pissed because someone is making a profit off of their work? Why don't they sell them then? It isn't like you can buy all the notes and then buy a Stanford degree, you still have to pay the tuitiona and get the grades.

    So if I delay making the notes until after class, are those free for distribution? How many times do I have to rewrite them before they are mine and only mine?

  • The ethics are clear (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I honestly don't understand the problem here.

    I personally would never post lectures notes that I had taken during a class on the web. That really is akin to the substance of the lecture. It is no different than rewording a textbook or paper and publishing it. Without permission from the author, it is clearly illegal. If credit is not given to the author, it is extremely unethical.

    If however I understand the material and form my own treatment of the subject, that of course is my own work.

    The lecture itself is clearly copyrightable, just as a play or dramatic presentation is. The ideas themselves, and the equations in particular, are not copyrightable. But the presentation of the material is a creative work, and is just as deserving of protection as a textbook.

    So maybe the law is poorly written - since it is not specifically cited, I cannot judge that. Perhaps the idea of copyright itself is flawed; but that is a separate matter. It is indisputable that attending a lecture, and then distributing the content as if it were your own work, is inexcusable.

    You must credit the originator. That much is basic ethics. If you don't already agree with that principle, there is probably no way to convince you of it.
  • OK... I used to take "commercial" notes, and also served as a managing editor back when in school. Just thought I'd through a couple thoughts in (in no particular order):

    (1) The notes serve a purpose for two ends of the spectrum: the very dedicated and the slacker. The very dedicated bought and reviewed the notes to use in addition to their own. The slackers, well, never went to class so used the notes to stay on the pace.

    (2) The notes themselves vary in quality, dramatically, from notetaker to notetaker, and service to service. Some are nearly transcripts, some are outlines, some are interpretive.... usually all are helpful!

    Issues? Why should they be [legal/illegal]? Well, like everything else, it's gray, not black and white.

    Certainly, a class with notes available from the service had more attendance problems ("why go to class? I'll just buy the notes."). Worse than just bummin' 'em from friends? Probably not, but the commercial availability was certainly an oversleeping-enabler.

    The professors put a lot of time into their materials... what right does any service have to make (mucho!) bucks off that work? Composing a *good* lecture is not easy... especially 2-3 times / week for months! But... if the professors don't care about attendance and/or can see the argument that the notes help the students learn the material (the important part, right?), then there's reason to allow the service.

    BUT... the University (and in many cases, the Government) pay for the time to develop and deliver those lectures (entirely private schools, with no federal funding (are there even any of those?) can skip this point). The Government (read: the _taxpayers_) pay for that information - why should some company get to make (mucho!) bucks off of it?

    In every case, for our service, we received professor approval *first* -- no approval, no notes. I don't know if it works that way everywhere, but I certainly hope so.

    So, point? Well... seems like something that shouldn't be decided on a legislature level (except in that the legislature represents the people who paid for the IP getting resold!). Should be professor / school decision. However, I do think that some of the profits of the services should be returned to the departments for their own use (probably not directly to the professors since, again, the school paid for the development of the lectures).

    Anyway... just a few thoughts to fuel the fires.

  • As a Grad student of UCDavis, we were all told that the lecture notes of any class were written by us, but the University holds the ownership. Pretty much anything that you do (at least good things) are bound by this. When you sign the paper that says you are going to the school, that is part of the deal that you are signing. Most folks are unaware of this, but some people follow it.

    Now originally, I thought it was a huge scam. But, while I still think that my thoughts are not (copyright, UCDavis) there is some good to be had here. The major one is that I will not get sued for having a wrong idea that is later proven wrong or someone else uses and it turns out to have terrible consequences. The Earth is still flat, right?

    So as far as this goes, it was sort of always this way. Also I have noticed that note taking services are not persecuted here, but I believe that they are also not the note takers property. As far as people taking notes in class, I encourage it, even if they buy them later from someone else. If you have TA'd in your lifetime, you would know the horrible feeling of 25 blank stares. My $0.02 (I think I'll GPL that, crap it is probably UCD's property)

    R

  • Professor Mathieu Deflem's problem is one of principle. If students bunk his class & pay up $10 to get a Kinko's copy of whatever was said in his class, that defeats the purpose of his class.

    So? Sounds like Prof. Deflem needs to peek his head out of academia for a second and think about another, more important principal - free speech.

    As others have noted, it would (possibly) be a different story if we were talking about audio/video recordings, but these are notes!!

    Two things disturb me about this situation. First, it's a fairly classic 'slippery-slope' problem. How long will it be until non-commercial distribution of class notes are prohibited? See RMS's 'Right to Read' [fsf.org] story for a worst-case scenario.

    Second, legislation that passes in CA is often adopted throughout much of the rest of the country. Clearly, that would be a mistake with this one.

    The bill is so clearly unconstitutional, I wonder that it got sponsered in the first place.

    Oh... IANAL....

  • That analogy fails miserably. Here's why..

    The tape copy of the Simpsons is still copyright Fox and Groening, as it is a 'verbatim' copy made under the auspices of fair use 'time-shifting' the original broadcast.

    The notes taken in a lecture by a student are copyright the student. Why? You're not time shifting and not copying verbatim, you're creating a unique work based on your impression of the class, the facts presented, and containing only the information you feel relevant. It's like reading a couple chapters from 'The Blind Watchmaker', and writing a short essay on evolution based on it.

    Audio tapes of the lecture can't be said to be copyright the prof in most cases either, especially in a 'discussion' type affair. Video recordings might be exempted with the argument that the effort of videography is creating a substantivly different work.

    If you really want to discourage companies selling notes from your lectures, leave a few copies of your personal 'gameplan' in the library, or provide them upon request.
  • I went to a big state school. This describes the experience of the general knowledge requirements classes that were taught in huge auditoriums, yes. In my major, and in other advanced classes I took, I doubt that anyone would be bothering to sell notes, or that there would be anyone who wanted to buy them. For those cases, I've assumed this debate is irrelevant, since you'd be working more closely with classmates and the professors anyway, and notes would add little to no value, since you missed participating in the class itself, which would hopefully be far more enriching than a simple reading of someone else's subjective notes on that experience.
  • Exactly, and what's worse is this sets the precident for banning programmers from being "inspired" by one person's source code to write their own equivalent code.

    Dangerous.
    --------
    Life is a race condition: your success or failure depends on whether you get the work done on time.
  • It was often the case on the course I took at Durham, UK that lecturers would supply notes for a fee. Figuring this would not be allowed under this legislature, luckly UK not part of CA (yet).

  • From an instructor's view (Score:4)

    by nweaver ( 113078 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @12:39PM (#725284) Homepage

    The purpose of the legislation is to prohibit the commercial distribution of lecture notes WITHOUT the consent of the instructor.

    This will not affect most on campus notetaking services, as they already ask for instructor's consent.

    As an occasional instructor, I believe that this is a good legislation: I created the lecture, for the university, either I or the University should retain the copyright on the lecture.

    Personally, I post my slides and have them available at a local copy shop before the lectures begin, because this is a useful service to the students. I don't gain any compensation from doing so, it just makes things easier both for myself and for my students.

    But I don't believe that someone should be able to make a derivitive work (which a set of lecture notes would be, since they are a direct or nearly direct transcription of my presentation), and profit from it , without my consent.


    Nicholas C Weaver
    nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu

  • Sorry California you do not have the authority. Title 17 of the US Code section 301(a) [cornell.edu]:

    301. Preemption with respect to other laws (a) On and after January 1, 1978, all legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright as specified by section 106 in works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression and come within the subject matter of copyright as specified by sections 102 and 103, whether created before or after that date and whether published or unpublished, are governed exclusively by this title. Thereafter, no person is entitled to any such right or equivalent right in any such work under the common law or statutes of any State.
  • You think that's lazy? Thanks to my school's wonderful new "smart classrooms" (really just a crappy pc on a cart with an LCD projector), the preferred method of lecturing is powerpoint. More often then not this is accomanied by the professor/TA reading aloud the contents for the benefit of the not-quite-awake-yet students. If it's a TA, we might get lucky and a word or 2 might even be in English! And those are the good classes!
  • Actually, it says it's illegal to sell notes *without authorization*. I'd bet that Student Disability Services and Clone Notes will be granted authorization within 5 minutes of the law going into effect (and through them, the students they hire).
  • IANAL, but I am a professor (in the University of California system). Under federal copyright law, I own the copyright to my lectures as long as they are fixed in a tangible medium, and indeed my notes are written out and printed. True, you can't copyright facts, but the lecture as a whole is a creative work in the same way as a book, and indeed many academic books begin as a lecture series. Summaries of my lectures are clearly a derivative work. Equally clearly, students have fair use rights to make such summaries, but fair use ends before commercial distribution starts.

    Now, the current situation is totally different for a teacher who does not "fix" his or her lectures in a tangible medium, since federal copyright law requires fixation for protection. What this law does is extend copyright protection to all lectures regardless of fixation. Since a student (or other listener) usually doesn't even know whether the fixation requirement has been satisfied, the legality of selling lecture notes has always been questionable. This law just clarifies the situation with a uniform policy.

    P.S. Nothing in the above should be interpreted as a statement on my personal belief of what a faculty member should do with his or her copyrights. Look, I'm a great believer in the GPL, and I think giving people the right to make noncommercial copies of my lectures is just the right thing to do. But just as code authors should be allowed to decide whether to use the GPL, I should have the right to choose the terms of copying of my intellectual work.

  • first day at sdsu I was informed by my english teacher/professor/whatever the hell their called that her lectures were her intellectual property and if anyone published them on the web (especially versity.com) she would file a lawsuit against the individual and give us an F. welcome to college.

  • I doubt this is in the bill, but the presence in the introduction here caught my attention.

    All images, sounds and ideas presented may not be re-used...

    Copyright and ownership issues of notes, images, and sounds aside, that line is rather silly with the ideas bit in it. Is not part of the purpose of the education to instill concepts and ideas?

    It may have been humorous exaggeration but I rather doubt even the densest of seats of higher learning would actually go as far as that. It defeats their purpose.

  • A good analogy for this situation (IMHO anyway) is audio books. Suppose you buy an audio book and play it on a tape player. If you then copy down everything you hear in a book and sell it as notes, you have pretty much just distributed a copy of the book...hence violation of copywrite.

    Of course, it's stupid to impose something like this on students. Can you imagine what you'd hear if you were a prof:

    prof: You failed this test!

    student: Only because I didn't have your notes.

    prof: Why not?

    student: I didn't want to violate any laws.

    Sheesh.

  • Thanks God... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... I forgot everythings I learn from school. Otherwise they'd come after me for "distributing them commercially" in my work place.
  • ...is that the University owns the notes. If you are teaching a course and you give the administration a copy of your notes they'll copy them and sell them just as they please. All you teachers out there, it is your course, don't give them your notes!

  • States can't do copyright! (Score:4)

    by troyboy ( 9890 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @12:52PM (#725297)
    This law is simply ineffective. Federal copyright law forbids states from giving copyright-like rights. See 17 U.S.C. 301(a), which says, in part:

    All legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright . . . in works of authorship that . . . come within the subject matter of copyright . . . are governed exclusively by this title. Therafter, no person is entitled to any such right or equivalent right in any such work under the common law or statutes of any State.

    So, the legal analysis doesn't even get to the First Amendment or fair use!!
  • Well, one possible market would be businesses in the computer industry that might want lecture notes from a class offered at a university for their employees. For example, I have lecture notes from an architecture class that I would imagine would be worth money to many co-workers who went to college in the 80's.
  • Is it true that theoretically I could drive a boat out the international waters and broadcast this stuff? "See that boat there. They're broadcasting Standford law lectures with implied oral consent not expressed written consent... or so the legend goes." IANAL but play one online. :) International Waters is a legal concept worth clarifying. Every nation in the world with a water border, whether lake, river, or ocean, has a region around them which is Their Sovereign Territory. For example, the Great Lakes besides Lake Chicago.. err.. Michigan all share the border with Canada, and are, by treaty, split along the midpoint with the two countries. There are rivers in Europe which make national boundries, and the rule is that at the geographic halfway point is where the country's sovereign territory starts. Now, oceans are a hell of a lot larger than rivers or lakes. So, how do you demark the amount of waterspace is a country's? Each country declares a certain amount, true, but the normal amount recognized is 12 nautical miles. (Yes, some countries claim 200 plus. BFD.) Inside that 12-mile (or whatever) area, you are fully subject to the national and regional (if applicable) laws of whatever country's area it is. For example, you yacht off the UN building in NYC, you are subject to NYC, New York State, and US law. When you are in international waters, no specific nation's laws apply. However, you can't just murder in IW and get away with it! Most likely scenario if you commit a felonious act (read: damned serious crime) in IW is that, upon arriving at a port of call, is your butt gets thrown into the slammer. The security forces of a ship are the effective police force aboard. Ships usually carry a brig where serious criminals are detained until an effective law enforcement agency can take custody of the individual. However, there are many, many concepts of International Law which apply to IW. Example: Sealand was abandonded property in IW, so the former Lieutenant now Prince of Sealand was able to claim the former military installation and claim it as a separate nation. (Long story. Check Slashdot's older pages, amen.) Main rule of IW is: Lower drek ain't important, what you finds you keeps, and the big stuff will eventually be punished.
  • the university would just keep tuition the same and profit from the sale of the notes.

    eudas
  • I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet... Unauthorized notes have the potential for being flat-out wrong. This is ultimately damaging to the students. I've seen this happen when I was a TA: the answer to why a large number of students got an exam question identically wrong was *not* that they were cheating, but they all studied on the same notes that had errors. It's a consumer group with a short memory (they graduate, move on to other classes, etc) so they are vulnerable to scammers. This measure might (might!) help.

  • You missed the inclusion of handwritten notes (Score:3)

    by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @01:21PM (#725311)
    You said

    So distributing handwritten notes(not teacher's notes!) should be okay

    but the clause you quoted covers that:

    This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium, including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten class notes.

    --
  • You're right.

    I missed that, when reading that.

    But there's still the point/clause about "commercial purpose", right? I did get that right, didn't I?

    The nick is a joke! Really!
  • Umm.. aside from the military academies, what Federal universities exist? Most are state or private institutions.
  • The problem is that it's always been a war of control, whether it be money, wealth, power, information, distribution, production, access, choice, priviledge, rights, whatever.

    For whatever reason, people will try to take from you whatever you are not willing to fight to protect. If you do not care for you rights, people, in their own self interest and for their own gain, will find a way to take away and use your lack of rights. If you do not care for your property, same. Lifestyle? Choices? whatever.

    It's not corporate feudalism, whatever that truly means. If I'm not mistaken, corporate feudalism is about the submission/submersion of the individual to the group/division/company/corporation.

    Akin to traditional feudalism, where the peasant swore fealty to the knight/samurai, who in turn owned his loyalty to a lord, up the chain of greater and greater lordships up to an emperor, king, ruler, or eventually, God.

    In this case, it would be translated to employee's loyalty to boss, who's loyalty is to the division, who's loyalty is to the organization, which perhaps would then owe loyalty to the parent company, and upwards until we get to the corporation.

    At least, that's what I think...

    The nick is a joke! Really!
  • the state still pays more than the students

    The state, with OUR tax money, paid for those lectures to be created, so they should be public domain and (i believe) even audio and video recordings should be redistributable, either for free or for a fee (a fee would presumably give someone reason to try to take the BEST notes, so that people will want to buy theirs).

    This would open up (open source? ;-) ) the educational process, and allow average citizens access to this info. Sure it's not nearly as good as actually being in the class, but it's something and doesn't cost much/anything. It would also allow profs at lower level schools (community college) to lift ideas from much better profs, which in turn would mean that their students are getting better educations than they may have otherwise. Where is the harm?

  • Re:From an instructor's view (Score:3)

    by philg ( 8939 ) on Friday October 06, 2000 @02:31PM (#725342)

    "But I don't believe that someone should be able to make a derivitive work (which a set of lecture notes would be, since they are a direct or nearly direct transcription of my presentation), and profit from it , without my consent. "

    I disagree. If you think students are making a "nearly direct transcription" of your words, you need to read some class notes.

    People are allowed to profit from written works that are as derivative as class notes all the time. A review of a play or a movie is no less a written work derived, in part, from a performed work. Copyright clearly belongs to the review writer (or his publisher), not the copyright holder of the work that inspired him. A reviewer frequently recounts events in the play/movie to his readers; is this a violation of the movie's copyright?

    In fact, your lecture is (probably) a distillation of courses you have taken, books and papers you have read, etc. Shouldn't the authors of those works, by your logic, have to consent to your "derivative" use of them to create your lectures? Your argument would indicate that, except in cases of recounting only your own research, your own lectures are an example of commercially profiting through the distribution of a derivative work. (You are getting paid to lecture, I assume.)

    And for that matter, what research worth doing these days isn't "derivative" of someone else's research? Was your research inspired by a paper you read, or by what someone else's findings were? Shouldn't that person consent before you release your research -- or lecture about them?

    Enough reductio ad absurdum. Certainly, a word-for-word transcript of your lecture, or a tape recording, would more clearly represent a potential violation of your rights -- in that case, every effort is made to preserve your presentation of the information, which is uniquely yours. As a student, I never had the time to write down every word the instructor said, and I didn't want to. I wanted to put down the information in a way I would remember.

    If you want to prohibit distribution of direct transcripts or recordings of your lectures, fine. But if you think an attempt to preserve the information in your lecture is a violation, you are saying that the information is your personal intellectual property, or the property of your school. For 99% of the information contained in the lectures I heard in school, that is laughably false -- imagine claiming that Newton's laws of motion or the Turner Thesis or Poe's ideas on fiction are your personal intellectual property!

    The remaining one percent were dirty jokes, which the professors can have. :)

    phil

  • Geez, I guess I'm weird then..

    My notes consisted of just what it was I was unlikely to understand, and 95% in my own words. (Not so slam on the profs and TA's, but a deep accent and broken english was the rule). If I was going to remember how 'X' worked, or was going to remember that 'foo' function was N^2+1, I simply didn't write it down or did a "Gave 20 min speech on doubly linked lists to clarify 'blazoom'"

    Granted, I attended my classes, and when I couldn't the material that had been covered was usually made clear ahead of time.. (IE, "In sie next lechtuer vie vill cohvering Reverse-length Klaxon processing."

    I saw plenty of students that directly copied, but as most of them were the challenge cases I took on tutoring, I would never in a million years write them off as 'typical', and it obviously did them no good. A buddy of mine did purchase notes up front from a former student (Cheap, like 'gimme a copy of your old notes and I'll buy you a sixer of that beer you like), for a couple classes. His feeling was that it sucked and didn't really give him any edge.

    Don't get me wrong; I think that people selling notes is a shitty thing to do, and only breeds malfeasance. You get 'Little Mr/Miss Party' thinking they can just snag the notes for a couple hundred bucks total for the load and be done with those pesky morning classes, and bombing European History for a quick trip back to Mommy, Daddy, and McDonalds. But until now it's been legal, or they would not be outlawing it.

  • Jim Davis owns the Trademark on the Garfield characters. He may or may not own the copyright of a particular strip, but it is the (TM) that keeps you from distributing your own Garfield(TM) cartoons.

    This is incorrect. While using Garfield in some other context may violate trademark (can't think of any, but if Snoopy was in public domain and an insurance company besides Met Life used it in advertising), any drawing of Garfield is going to be derivative of Davis' creative work. See the Peter Rabbit case (Frederick Warne & Co. v. Book Sales, Inc., 481 F.Supp. 1191) for details.

  • So if I write a book based on a 4 year CS program, there's a good chance that I couldn't sell it because the majority (Hell lets say all, everyone knows you can't learn outside a university) of my learning would be derived from the university teaching, which consisted mainly of lectures and labs formulated by the professors. In fact, if you read a book on a given topic and then write a book on the same topic, what's to keep the original author from suing you because you learned something from his book? Patently absurd, yes, but that's the way the world is going.

    Of course I didn't finish college and wouldn't claim to have learned anything of particular value there, so on that front at least, I'm safe.

  • Interestingly, part of the explanatory text of the bill points out that "[e]xisting case law provides that in the absence of evidence of agreement to the contrary, a teacher, rather than the institution for which he or she teaches, owns the common law copyright to his or her lectures." That does seem to make some sense, but are notes "the lecture"? If I draw a sketch of a painting, does the original artist own my sketch, too? (Or in this case, does the University of California?)

    The reason for this is that the common law copyright was expressly abrogated in the Copyright Act of 1976 with few exceptions (see
    Copyright Act Section 301 [cornell.edu], which preempts most state law trying to ape copyright law. The few exceptions include works that have not been fixed in tangible media, such as extemporaneous speeches.

    However, they will have a great deal of trouble here: Most professors give their lectures from notes, effectively providing a public performance of a work (the notes) that WAS fixed in tangible media. In such cases, the California Bill may well have been preempted, and the case reverts to questions of whether notes taken by an audience constitute infringement, fair use or original restatments by a student of the unprotectable IDEAS of a lecture.

    Long and short of this -- the litigation over this bill may be very interesting (read expensive and complicated). Supremacy and Commerce clause cases make for great lawyering -- although they may seem quite dull to most lay audiences.
  • I disagree. I believe that the content of your lectures ought to belong to the people, as they are supported by the State and Federal Government. Perhaps things would be different if it were a private school, in which case you could make this part of the contract you have with students, if you really desired to hold this license on your lectures.

    The US Constitution creates Intellectual Property rights "To promote the progress of science and useful arts...". I don't really see how carving out a new type of IP for the semantic content of speeches made to students, which is what lectures are, promotes science or "useful arts". If your ideas are so interesting and new as to warrant IP protection, then you should publish the ideas, copyright them and sell them.

    As others have pointed out, this is a very dangerous precedent, a slippery slope from which we might find ourselves gagged from just trying to relate what certain "protected classes" (like professors) say.

    And, really, what do you have against someone profitting from the packaging and dissemination of ideas. If the product is any good, it would only go to build a reputation for you as a teacher and help support those book sales that might help you to make some money off of your ideas for yourself.

    You might find it annoying that others are profiting from the content of your lectures, but, to me, that's not sufficient cause to create a new class of IP. We don't have an inherent right not to be annoyed.


    -Jordan Henderson

  • This will probably get litigated. And the State of California will probably lose.

    I could see arguing that a transcript of a lecture is a derived work. But notes that summarize it? No way. That's journalism.

  • this sets the precident for banning programmers from being "inspired" by one person's source code to write their own equivalent code.

    Precisely why RMS doesn't read UNIX® source code. The known legal workaround for this is "clean room R.E.": have one team translate the source code into a specification written in English or other similarly human-comprehensible notation, and have another team translate it back into C. And make sure all communication that passes over the Great Wall is logged so if they "see you in court," you'll have evidence that you used legal R.E. techniques.


    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
  • I work for Arizona State University. In order to abide by the 11th commandment, which is CYA, I must give notice that nothing I'm writing here in any way represents an official or unofficial policy or point of view on the part of Arizona State University, its boad of regents, employees, or the state legislature. This post is submitted without any warranties either implied or explicit, use at your own risk.

    There are at least a couple of local companies near campus who pay students to take notes. These notes are then sold to other students. The policy of most instructors is that if a student is caught taking notes for one of these services, they'll be kicked out of the class and recieve an F.

    When you stop and consider the fact that the people who are going to be most interested in buying these notes are other students in the class, it really makes you wonder what the issue is. If I'm not enrolled in a university and taking a particular class, what real interest am I going to have in someone's notes for that class? If I have an interest in a particular subject there are almost always books available which provide much more information than I'd be able to glean from someone's lecture notes.

    Thus the IP issue is really just a smokescreen. You're teaching a class and therefore being paid to provide information/instruction to students. If some of your students choose to purchase lecture notes then wouldn't it stand to reason they'll learn more? Are you going to similarly restrict them from reading other materials, such as books and articles, which you have not personally read aloud to them in class? Is the purpose of going to class to learn or is it to furiously write down every word you say because you're just so great? I go to class to learn. If you're there because of your ego that is your problem.

    One of the other arguments I hear often is that these services lower student attendance. Now this I do consider to be a true issue. If someone is taking a class, they should go to class. They shouldn't just buy lecture notes and maybe study the book. Reading lecture notes is no substitute for person to person instruction. The solution to this problem is simple, take attendance and make it part of the grade. Some instructors have already begun doing that here. If a student misses more than so many days of class, then they'll not pass unless they have a very good documented reason why they were not there.

    I personally almost never take notes. I'm there to learn and understand and I find that writing everything down interferes with that as it splits my attention. If there is some detail that isn't obvious or in the textbook, then I'll write that down with a note about its context. But otherwise I spend my time listening, thinking and working to comprehend the subject matter. I find that many people don't do that. Instead they try to memorize things, which is far more difficult than understanding them and in the end is self defeating. Someone might be able to get away with this in a general studies history or sociology class, but if they're taking math or science as part of their major, they're not going to make it very far with that approach.

    Ultimately I don't truly understand what justifiable gripe universities and instructors have with these services. I can think of quite a few unjustifiable gripes, such as loss of control, loss of ego, undermining of their imagined authority etc. There are probably other irrational reasons as well that I'm not aware of. I'm not a psychologist, so when individuals and institutions start acting nutty I usually don't understand all the reasons why.

    It would be refreshing if the universities and instructors would simply tell the truth and give their actual heart felt reasons for opposing these services. But of course they'll never do that because they would immediately discredit themselves.

    I'm waiting and hoping that the ACLU will get in on this. Till then I'd expect a very profitable underground economy to spring up around the buying, selling and trading of lecture notes.

    Lee Reynolds
  • Awwww... the disabled kiddies won't be touched by this bad law. That's a good thing.

    Lets hug.

  • and indeed, may go too far, it appears that what the bill is intended to do is prevent someone from transcribing a lecture and selling it.

    And this makes sense. See, what if someone was selling access to a web site, or a periodical that had all the U of C lectures for the year? Even the evening after the lecture? Wouldn't quite seem right, eh?

    They simply want their lectures to remain their property, as works of art. (consider l¼ ring a performance, perhaps)
  • On one side, advocates of free speech, on the other, folks who cry, "Free Education". Microsoft wants their freedom to innovate... you know, about the only folks who seem to dislike the word are the politicians here in America. Certainly didn't get mentioned much in the recent debates... oh, except when talking about other parts of the world, where they lack it (more than we do). Even then, they prefer to talk about "democracy".

    Well, it's nice someone's promoting free education by keeping people from reading about what's said in college classrooms. Now if we could only round up those darned books...

  • Since I'll eventually have to explain this to students and have basic understanding of the rules within UC, I'll chime in with what I think is going on. [IANAL]

    A UC instructor has commented [slashdot.org] on his opinion on this matter and is correct on a number of points. Copyright is, by default, held by the instructor [ucop.edu] and not the university. The syllabus for the course is a legal document that sometimes grants students non-commerical duplication rights for personal use. But nweaver fails to address the case of handwritten notes.

    There's a loophole here that I think the legislature is trying to plug:

    Copyright law protects the preparation of derivative works [freeadvice.com].

    Pertinent bits from the above:
    "Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work."

    Given that abridgements, compilations, dramas based on novels, sculptures based on drawings, and so on serve as examples of derivative works, lecture notes don't seem like much of a stretch.

    So, I don't really think there is anything new here. However, there seems to be nothing stating definitively that lecture notes are in fact derivative works. So rather than test this in court over and over, legislating it would seem prudent. It's now in black and white, and penalties attached.

    This strikes me as a pre-emptive move against problems that will likely crop up when the UC and CSU have to fully invest in distance learning. The 9 UC campuses have been warned that they'll have to absorb an additional 70,000 students over the next 10 years (the equivalent of Berkeley and UCLA combined), and the entire public higher education system in CA will have to take about 700,000 over what they currently serve (roughly the total population of Delaware).

    Now, given that the dear taxpayers of California (of which I am one) are likely unwilling to build the equivalent of twenty major universities over the next 10 years, alternatives will have to be found - and distance learning will be a big component of that.

    With 2 million students enrolled in higher ed in California in 2010, the low cost of distribution thanks to the internet, and the (hopefully) ease of electronic payment by that time, there's a hell of a big market here for people to tap for distribution of lecture notes, papers, and so on. Watch for more legislation to come...
  • I think giving teachers copyright protection on what they teach is a dangerous road to go down. If teachers can claim copyright on the lecture notes, why can't they claim copyright on other expressions of those lectures? Maybe the next claim is that if you learned some subject in a particular way, you can't teach it in the same way to your students unless you get the permission of the professor that taught you. And further down the road, what would prevent professors from claiming intellectual property on other uses you put their lectures to--an introductory paragraph in a paper you write, an idea for a patent, etc.?

    The notion that you have a copyright to some form of a recording of you is also not at all universally applicable. For example, if a photographer takes a picture of you, the photographer has the copyright, not you.

    Nobody ever promised professors that they would be able to retain intellectual property rights on their lectures. The whole purpose of teaching is to convey information that the students record and further disseminate. Why on earth would we want to change the rules now and in this sensitive area?

  • Um. Read the bill. It says, "Nothing in this section shall be construed to interfere with the rights of disabled students under the law"..

    From the DMCA [cornell.edu]: Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

    Notice the similarity? The clause in the DMCA didn't save the DeCSS defendants from a permanent injunction and an order to pay court costs. Even though they claimed fair use. Why do you think the clause in this bill will fare any better? (Other than the fact California is outside Judge Kaplan's jurisdiction [uscourts.gov]).

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