Second-hand notes are a problem (Score 1)

I suspect that UCLA is not so much worried about copyright as about educational policy. I've been teaching in colleges for some twenty years. I've got a lot of experience with students' notes, and I can tell you that I'd be very concerned about anyone looking at a student's notes and thinking he or she could learn the content of my lectures from them. Much of the time they're just not all that good, and students who are most likely to put their notes in fraternity files or sell them are least likely to take good ones. And yet some students think that reading second-hand notes is as good as going to class: they sleep late instead, and they end up doing poorly. I'm not sure that copyright is the right way to address this problem, but it is a real problem.

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.