Lecture Notes Considered Infringement 385
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a new lawsuit, taking notes in class is copyright infringement. Of course, it's not quite that simple. The professor is partnered with an E-book maker that wants to sell the material themselves, and the people taking notes pay students to take good ones, then sell copies to everyone else. But that just means that the case will hinge upon whether or not lecture notes are fair use. Either way, I wonder how long it will be before you will have to sign a EULA whenever you walk into class"
Offically gone too far (Score:4, Interesting)
Fair use (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Correction (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Offically gone too far (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that in addition to death and taxes that copyright infringement is the third of the certainties everyone will encounter during their lives.
This is really turning into a war between the greedy and the needy.
Re:Rights to shakespear (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:you shouldn't be able to copyright facts (Score:2, Interesting)
I almost hate to say it, (Score:1, Interesting)
Really, what we need is for the best professors to produce video lectures, especially for the subjects that change little from year to year (calculus, etc.) The rest of the professors can do what they want without having to bore us with teaching a subject that they seem to have little interest in, and the graduate students can grade our work and answer our questions.
Things seem to be heading this way, but not fast enough.
Re:Rights to shakespear (Score:4, Interesting)
The "original form" doesn't exist.
What we have are incomplete and sometimes contradictory readings based on the manuscripts that found their way into print.
Shakespeare himself was perfectly capable of cutting and splicing scenes that ran too long or got in the way of a successful bit of stage business that appealed to an audience.
His plays will always have to be edited for reading and performance.
Re:Ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the difference with the *IAA? As far as I know, only the most extreme elements of the anti-*IAA movement believe copyright should be abolished. Most believe copyright is useful, but the pendulum has swung too far in favor of copyright holders. For the professor's actions to parallel the *IAA, he would have to be filing lawsuits against random students and ebook distributors in a fishing expedition. Instead, he's doing exactly what everyone here has been asking of the *IAA - track down through legal means exactly who is doing the infringing, and file suit against them.
Re:Rights to shakespear (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:this is clear infringement for commercial gain (Score:4, Interesting)
And since when are all college courses simply "standard knowledge in a field"? Clearly, you have not taken any higher level college courses beyond the requirements for a bachelors degree. Professors teaching a doctorate, or sometimes even masters, level course most definitely teach based on their own original research. I've even taken undergraduate courses with professors who taught based on their own research to a certain degree. In that case, it was only to enhance the "standard knowledge", but in many graduate level courses, it's the original research that is being taught.
I will say that I do agree that this whole copyrighting of lecture notes is a bit crazy, but only when you consider that some entrepreneurial student might try to sell their lecture notes from this class, which I consider to be legally questionable in the first place, regardless of whether or not a professor is doing it himself.
Re:Correction (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Correction (Score:4, Interesting)
The word you're looking for is "tenure."
"It works, at my alma mater I saw a professor let go when his classes dropped to zero enrollment because he had sufficiently pissed off his students."
And in mine I saw a university resort to either marking classes taught by "staff" or "accidentally" reversing which professors taught which sections, all to ensure that the students had already committed to their schedule before they stroll into class on the first day to see who will really be teaching them.
Worst case scenario: put him on sabbatical for a little bit. Students move on, either by graduating or dropping out, so the collective memory of the student body only goes back so far.
Actually, you should be listening to your own advice: the professor is the university's employee, so this money-making tactic probably has the implicit consent (if not the explicit endorsement) of the higher-ups in the continuing quest to milk money from the students.
Re:Correction (Score:4, Interesting)
Students are neither the boss nor the customer, they are (one* of) the product(s). A campus' reputation rises and falls with the quality of its products.
* - Research is the other major product. Several people have already noted that a lot of professors spend more time on research than on students. That's because like anybody else, they follow the incentive systems, and Department Heads, Deans, Provosts, and Campus Presidents all know that research grants put a lot more money in their hands than tuition does.
UF and Professor Profit (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who teaches at UF, the opportunities to distribute material to students for free or without profiting are numerous - there are multiple places that will print coursepacks within walking distance of the University, and the library provides an excellent electronic reserves system over which digital materials can be distributed. The only reason to distribute course notes for $50-100 electronically, as Professor Moulton does, is to make money off of your students.
Other professors at UF, as described in the article, offer $30 e-workbooks of extra credit through companies they own - in other words, directly allowing students the option of paying the professor for higher grades.
The depth of conflict of interest involved here is disgusting. Regardless of the legal merits of the case (I am not a lawyer and do not know), UF should forbid this sort of naked profiteering off of students.
Re:Rights to shakespear (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Relevant (Score:5, Interesting)
Theoretically aren't your paying for the transmittal and indefinite future use of the ideas discussed in the class? If not then what exactly are your tuition bills paying for?
Re:Relevant (Score:3, Interesting)
If notes were to be illegal then the students will learn less and therefore be of less use for the society in the future.
Too much emphasis is made on copyright and patents today so the only profession left where you can make money will be as a patent or copyright lawyer. And since those that are applying and help to make the law are often lawyers themselves this will be a perpetual wheel.
Re:Ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
That link kind of disproves your point:
Sounds like a textbook to me.
Look -- a lecture, almost by definition, is not engagement, it's presentation, and a presentation can simply be duplicated. Anything good in a lecture is either already published, or likely to be published soon. For that matter, sometimes lectures are recorded, and effectively become a textbook themselves -- or at least another reference material.
Again: A lecture is not engagement. A conversation is engagement. Some professors choose to have a conversation and call it a lecture, which is probably a better way of teaching, and cannot be duplicated. There are certainly other ways of teaching. While I am mostly self-taught, Wikipedia is no substitute for an actual classroom -- but the lectures themselves, at least, contain nothing in the way of facts or understanding which cannot be found elsewhere, even in print.
And I'm sorry you can't find passion in textbooks or papers -- you must not have found very good ones, then. There are at least two separate books I've read on programming which got me excited about it, taught me to see it as an art, and fed my imagination with possibilities -- and that's on programming, even introductory programming, which you would expect to be a dry subject.
Re:Right to Read (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Relevant (Score:2, Interesting)
Although the general rule is that the person who creates a work is the author of that work, there is an exception to that principle: the copyright law defines a category of works called "works made for hire." If a work is "made for hire," the employer, and not the employee, is considered the author. The employer may be a firm, an organization, or an individual.
To the extent the material provided by the Professor can be copyrighted (a big question), the copyright should belong to the University rather than the Professor unless they have an explicit agreement otherwise.
Re:this is clear infringement for commercial gain (Score:3, Interesting)
In upper-level classes, it's expected that profs will talk about their own research to a certain extent, both to attract students who are interested in working on it and to excite students with knowledge and ideas that are cutting edge. Accordingly, they'll talk about their current research projects, which typically will include a mix of published and unpublished work.
If the work is good - and it's not that hard to tell that about your own work - it doesn't really matter if you talk about it before it's peer-reviewed to students in a seminar-style course. They're there to get a taste for the field, learn some cool things, and get their hands dirty in cutting-edge projects of their own. Giving them a peek at research that's taking shape isn't "irresponsible", it's a valuable piece of moving students from thinking about assignments to thinking about research. That's your choice to make; don't presume you have the right to make it for anyone else.