University prof says students can't sell notes from his classes because it violates his copyright
Michael Moulton, a prof at the University of Florida, is suing a company tha republishes his students' notes from class, because he says that taking notes on his classes and selling them violates his copyright.
Those notes are illegal, Faulkner and Moulton contend, since they are derivative works of the professor's copyrighted lectures.LinkIf successful, the suit (.pdf) could put an end to a lucrative, but ethically murky businesses that have grown up around large universities to profit from students who don't always want to go to the classes they are paying for.
The suit could also have ramifications for more longstanding businesses such as Cliffs Notes, which summarize copyrighted novels.
Faulkner Press publishes two e-textbooks that Moulton wrote and uses in his classes, and sells its own set of class notes for the course.
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I wonder to what extent the professor believes he can copyright facts? Surely the content in his lectures is fact-based? Are his students allowed to have citations in their papers?
By his beliefs, movie reviews are prohibited derivative works.
So are the "seven book chapters, 38 refereed journal articles and a textbook" (Faulkner Press, http://www.faulknerpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=14) that Moulton authored derivative works of the researchers he no doubts cites and references?
The final line of Cory's quotation says it all.
The notes, it seems to me, are the property of the students, not the professor, unless they are simply a transcription of his words. They therefore have a right to do with them what they will.
An important point, though, is how much of the notes reproduce original research or ideas produced by the professor? Say he's done some hard-won original research, and produced groundbreaking conclusions from them? Surely he's entitled to compensation for his efforts, or at the very least, credit for them?
If it were the RIAA, they would be going after the people buying the notes, not the company publishing them, it seems.
From another comment, I would hope the notes for his class that you buy are a bit more complete than a movie review would be. Otherwise you'd get something like "I give his chapter on wildlife introduced in Colorado two thumbs up!" Not terribly useful.
Since the professor's lectures are, presumably, oral and not recorded, he has no copyright in them to begin with. We just studied this in our Copyright Law class - the professor used that very example.
Now, mind you, if he is reading them verbatim off a printout (or recording the lectures), then they are protected by copyright - but how many professors really do that?
He might have a better chance with applying an anti-bootlegging statute (which is not in the Copyright Act), but I'm not sure how far he'd get with that.
And Nick D. - copyright protects original expression fixed in a tangible medium; if it's not original, or if it's not fixed in a tangible medium of expression, it doesn't matter how much labor he put in. There is a case that's exactly on point - I'll look it up and post it. (thanks to BoingBoing for helping me study for my Copyright Law exam!)
I think the issue here is not that the prof so loves his words that he doesn't want people copying them; it's that he wants people to stop buying lecture notes, and thinks he's found a legal way to do so. People who buy other people's notes are not just doing themselves a disservice (by getting a watered-down and filtered education), but they're doing a disservice to the rest of the class by not being there to participate in discussions.
i can't wait to see his face when he loses. fucking florida, they make texas look good.
What about fraternities and sororities that have been keeping class and test files for generations?
I don't know, there were a couple people in my classes who seriously detracted from the value of the discussion by participating.
Probably would be a safe bet to say they were the type to buy lecture notes.
Cliffs Notes are the same idea as Coles Notes. And if Coles Notes are legal in Canada, where we have less rights under Fair Dealing than the US has under Fair Use, then Cliffs Notes should be fine.
That's why my notes are always highly transformative! :)
That is widely accepted fact among most Arizona State University Professors and their students, besides cases where opts to be a designated note taker for the disabled, sick, etc. I believe that the last couple years I attended, it was outlined in their policies.
Pure nonsense. From both sides.
A lecture attempts to explain a theory, concept or approach that the students must learn. The notes taken during a class are merely an outline of the material to be learned in the course and may point to subtleties in concept not readily gleaned from the text. More importantly, the notes cover the material most likely to be seen on an exam (which may change from time to time).
Any professor dull enough to present the same material year after year is either a hack or totally unconcerned with the concept of teaching. Universities and colleges are supposed to present the most up to date information available. How can you copyright knowledge?
Any student unconcerned enough to attend lectures or unconnected enough to get notes from their classmates deserves to get a lesser grade than they might otherwise feel entitled to receiving. If you don't intend to attend, you might as well enroll in a correspondance course or have a mastery of every element in the text.
It also seems the professor's actions are counterproductive. I've had professors who would distribute lecture notes at the beginning of each week so each student could annotate the notes as they saw fit during the week's lectures. These professors always felt is was better to spend your time transcribing subtleties of concept during the lecture rather than trying to be a stenographer.
That said. There shouldn't be any need to pay for class notes. Many student societies maintain their members notes and even past exam questions, which (at least during my time at university) are available for the asking. The only cost is that of operating the copy machine.
This seems very odd.
When I was at UCLA, they had a university run note-taking service. I don't know if it still exists, but it was widely advertised on campus.
They would actually hire students to take notes in a class, then sell them to those who missed the lectures, for like a couple of bucks or something.
It was an office right in the student union, in fact, I think it was part of the textbook store. And obviously wholly endorsed by the university.
This was quite the industry around Penn State University, with companies such as 'Nittany Notes' et al providing this service.
I guess my feeling would be that if these copied notes are being purchased by students who are registered in said professor's classes, they are presumably paying their tuition. Paying the university grants access to the educational material being provided in the course notes, which I would think should be thought of granting them a license to have and use the material.
I guess the problem creeps in when a third party is offering a for-profit service of redistributing the notes, albeit to students who have paid the university, and thus the professor, for access to the material.
Would the professor raise these same objections if it were a registered student photocopying notes from a classmate, or would he want to sue the owner of the photocopier used, who might charge $0.10 per page for the priviledge of the copies. If not, how is that really any different than a focused 3rd party business that catalogs, retains, and redistributes notes?
I always hated note taking in college. I spent more time writing than understanding the material, franticly trying to keep up, and inevitably missing things. A far far better system would be for the prof to provide downloadable lecture notes and let their students concentrate on working through the material in their minds, not scrivening.
"And Nick D. - copyright protects original expression fixed in a tangible medium; if it's not original, or if it's not fixed in a tangible medium of expression, it doesn't matter how much labor he put in.."
Granted. My question was an ethical one, not a legal one.
If you are running a company called "how I got an A dot com," then you pay people to take the notes, and people who don't want to attend class pay you to get the notes so they can pass the final exam.
That's what this is about. Not borrowing somebody else's notes from class.
Exactly, so why make a legal claim at all? If it's executed in University policy, it doesn't have to be based in law (necessarily). All it would take is a line in the student code that students found in possession of notes that aren't their own (for the purposes of buying, selling, trading, or whatever) are eligible for expulsion.
Not that I'm advocating this, of course, but it seems like the simpler solution.
Now, that being said, it seems my professors have taken the opposite approach, and they put all of their PowerPoint'd notes online, so there's really no economic value to them because every student in the class can get them free. This, I think, is the more reasonable approach.
@#13:
Any professor dull enough to present the same material year after year is either a hack or totally unconcerned with the concept of teaching. Universities and colleges are supposed to present the most up to date information available. How can you copyright knowledge?
So math, chemistry, biology, and physics professors teaching the introductory courses are hacks?
Curious. Please, please do enlighten me how to introduce the concept of an integral in new and exciting ways every semester.
The bully here isn't the professor. It's Faulker Press, the for profit educational media corporation that brought the lawsuit. Faulkner has to take the stance that professors have strong rights in their lectures so that they can bargain with professors and exclude competitor corporations who bargain with students for their independently authored notes.
I'm a college professor.
I do find the business of selling notes from hired notetakers to be distasteful. And the kind of "short cut to learning" mentality of students who participate in things like this is a problem.
But the professor in this case is acting like a total dick.
Perhaps someone should send him a link to MIT's OpenCourseWare program to show him what a more enlightened approach to the distribution of knowledge looks like.
Or perhaps one of his colleagues could show him how to effectively rework his courses each semester, thus not only frustrating the possibility of "buying" a better test score, but perhaps making him a better teacher in the process.
#13 stole my thunder (or at least violated my intellectual property rights to that thunder) so I'll just say this: professors who administer their courses in such a way that purchasing such a summary is of any use whatsoever aren't worth employing in the first place.
He could solve this problem by publishing his own annotated lecture notes online, and saying on the first day of class, "I triple-dog dare you to try to pass this course by memorizing the raw content of these notes." If he's got a course worth teaching, and if he's willing to put five minutes into revising his exams or assignments so that they measure the understanding of someone who comes to class and listens to what he says, then that's that. And as a bonus, it weeds out the profoundly lazy student who thinks that these expensive doodles are worth anything in the first place.
But there's a wrinkle here--the suit isn't being filed by him, but by a publisher of some sort to whom he's assigned his "copyright." So it may be that he's mad that they're not buying HIS warmed-over notes.
#19:
Perhaps the professor learns a little more about how to present the material in an understandable way each year? See #21.
And condescension, while it may amuse you, only irritates nice people. And it makes you look foolish, to boot, when you are wrong.
As a continuation of my prior comment (#20), the professor is *not* a party to the lawsuit. He assigned his rights to Faulkner and Faulkner is bringing the suit. All claims for relief are
directed to remunerate Faulkner. This is not about education, this is about MONEY. Copyright is a monopoly, and the easiest profits to rake in are government-backed monopoly profits.
@#13
Please see @#21
Two examples
I once had a professor that gave the same lecture word for word every year. These lectures were essentially a regurgitaion of the class text, which was written by said professor. This professor was a Nobel Laureate teaching an upper level course, but the classes were so dull and tedious as to be painful. There was nothing in the class that could not be gleaned from the book; there was no difference between reading the book and attending class. Things got so bad during the semester I was taking the course that attendance essentially dropped to zero and the professor was forced to start introducing new material just to bring the students back.
I once sat in on a course, not even auditing, because the professor's lectures were so vibrant and stimulating. This class was usually standing room only. The coursework was well outside my course of study and I never intended to get a grade. But the intensity of the lectures drew me in nonetheless.
Adding, since #19 posted his/her comment while I was writing mine:
These sorts of things don't exist for calculus classes (etc.) because the only thing stopping a Calc student from buying a calculus text on his own and "unethically" learning the material that way is the fact that it's ALWAYS easier to let the professor teach it to you directly. Ditto with basic physics, intro chem., etc.--anything where the evaluation is based on learning an immutable process or fixed series of elements, rather than synthesizing a complex bunch of differentially-related facts, theories, interpretations, etc.
That's not to say it's easy to learn the immutable rules of calculus, which is why we award credit for those classes. If you could pass a calculus exam by rote memorization of someone's notes, then yeah, the professor involved would be a hack, because the questions would have to be something like "What definition of derivative did I put up on the board?" or "What answer did I get when we did this problem in class?"
There shouldn't be any need to pay for class notes.
I know that professors aren't always paid as well as they deserve, but running these little side businesses seems unethical. Just on the principle of avoiding the appearance of impropriety, doesn't it look like students who buy his notes out of the back of his station wagon might get better grades than those who don't? It's seedy.
@#25
Oops. Referenced myself. @#25 should point @#19, not @#13, to @#25.
@ #27: I don't see an ethical dilemma in a professor selling his textbook to his students, or even requiring it; it's his course, he can make anything required reading he sees fit, including his own. I could be wrong.
But I've never known a professor to sell class notes out of his station wagon. Have you? Maybe I've missed something here?
Since the prof has already typed up his notes he should be able to offer them cheaper than the note taking service who, presumable, has to pay a student to generate notes. So, why not compete? Unfortunately, the professor seems to think that copyright extends to the ideas in his lectures rather than just the specific expression he uses to convey them and is unwilling to compete on the merits. If nothing else, students might like to get notes that are more legible than the black on dark green paper offered by "Einstein." (Nothing you couldn't filter out with a back process in Photoshop, mind you.)
I am a student at the University of Florida, it has been mentioned before that these notes for sale are for entry level classes, and that is true. Entry level business classes actually, and the lectures are recorded, anybody who is signed up for a UF Business class can stream the lecture as it is broadcast or download and watch them later, this is largely due to the fact that there are thousands of students in these classes per semester so for seating and organization issues they seem to work quite well. I took one of these classes for a general ed requirement and bought the notes as well (they cost about 1/3 as much as buying a USED version of the text) from what I understand, this particular professor wrote the text he teaches from, and makes a fair deal of royalties on it.
(Also, I apologize on behalf of my university that this and "don't taze me bro" are probably all you've heard about us this past year... Tim Tebow too probably, but thats o.k.)
hmmph! When I was a student, professors had to profess. The campus was just that, apart from abandoned buildings, they used tents. Each professor collected at the door and students went to see who had the draw. Needless to say, they were better showmen then.... why, I remember that Paracelsus fellow.....
Ick, no. Selling your notes to your students? No. Not kosher. Selling a textbook, yes. Selling notes, no.
Students have paid their tuition, as someone has pointed out, and the professor has been paid a salary for creating the class syllabus and lectures, so selling notes to his class is ethically dubious, as Antinous points out.
That would be sort of like asking for an entrance fee at the door to his classroom.
It -ALMOST- sounded like the professor is looking to copyleft his work so that others cannot profit by taking near exact copies of his lectures and sell them to new students... almost.
I do think that being required to make a purchase from someone who is teaching and grading you is a fundamental ethical violation. Do you want to get healthcare from a physician who makes a profit from selling drugs on the side? Do you get the best healthcare if you don't purchase your medications from her? Do you get a worse grade if you don't buy your professor's book? It's sleazy. It may have become the norm over the last century or so, but it's still unethical.
I'm a university lecturer. When a student who missed an important lecture (I don't really "lecture" that often) comes up to me and asks what she missed, what do I say?
"See if you can get the notes from someone."
Why would I care if that someone charged her?
This is the university of florida, not "some university in florida". I wonder whether the principle that that there is no copyright in speech by the government applies here. Don't know the answer, just raising the question.
This is a phenomenally stupid position for the professor to take, since it would essentially render much of journalism (summarising something that someone said) illegal. That can't win in court; there's no way.
And, FWIW, I went to UF and will admit to buying class notes for a class I was stuck in and didn't care about. There's no way I can be convinced it's a substitute for going to class and taking your own notes, any more than taking a required class I didn't care about was a substitute for taking an unrequired one I did.
@Kyle, #36, re: your last question:
Of course you wouldn't care, but if you sold all of your rights in your lecture materials to a corporation, would that corporation care? [see my comments #20 & #24 for context]
its all so venal. How many high grades are just purchased directly with cash or sex?
I found an article on this suit printed in Wednesday's copy of UF's student paper, the Alligator...
http://www.alligator.org/articles/2008/04/02/news/local/080402_einsteins.txt
from here, it looks the the suit is being pursued by the text's publisher, not no much from the professor himself.
I found an article on this suit printed in Wednesday's copy of UF's student paper, the Alligator...
http://www.alligator.org/articles/2008/04/02/news/local/080402_einsteins.txt
from here, it looks the the suit is being pursued by the text's publisher, not no much from the professor himself.
@ #42,
Thanks James, please see my comments #20 and #24 as well
This is crazy. Isn't the professor's teachings the derivative work of other peoples teachings?
Professor Moulton's Wildlife Issues class is known to everyone here at UF as just about the easiest and most effortless class you can take. I started hearing it about it at Freshman orientation when I was looking for Gen Ed credits. I never took the class myself because it had no relevance to my field of study and I prefer to take classes where I might actually learn something useful, but I know many people who have.
Perhaps, as many people have said before, if Professor Moulton designed his class in such a way that you couldn't buy the notes, cram the night before, and only show up to class on test days, he wouldn't have such a problem.
I agree NickD - the prof selling the notes from his class isn't very classy. Textbook yes, notes no. Weird. He should just include the outline, like so many are mentioning here.
What's sort of odd to me is the amount of people here going after the prof.
As I understand it:
1.) The students are selling stenographer-ish copies of his lectures through a third party, not the university or any university sponsored organizations.
2.) The prof wants that to stop.
He may be going about it the wrong way, and should, as suggested, use the bootlegging statute. But I am all behind him doing SOMETHING to draw attention to this, and get it to stop. I think this is about education AND money, #24.
My stance is that the 3rd party selling the distributed notes, taken by paying students of the university, is ethically wrong. I also believe it may still be legally wrong, #5, because universities own the copyright to works created within their walls. I know this is a FACT when it comes to student film. I wonder if this is applicable to the prof's lectures. Or (this is a stretch) if the performance of the lecture is copyright-able.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#110
See section 110 on performances... I'm not sure if that helps my performance point or not, but I want to get to the bottom of it either way. :)
What if they were selling the audio recordings of his lectures? Would it be okay then? I would highly doubt that these notes are being sold as paraphrased. Is the medium of text stenography less of an offense than a recording? Is the intonation of his voice the key deciding factor here?
If so, why not create a 3rd party business that buys tape-recorded lectures from poor students looking to make a quick buck? Stream them. #17 Ben had that point earlier.
Yes, I know recording on university property without permission is against the law unless in public areas. And it's very illegal to use people's closeup images (or voice) for profit without a release. So is it illegal to sell a transcript that has been written verbatim from a professor, when the universitiy's profit is derived from them essentially giving their take on a subject via lecture?
After typing this out... I think it should be the university going after the 3rd party, not the textbook company. Still... SOMEBODY go after that bs 3rd party company that is implying that class isn't important.
Since this is an educated thread, my citations :).
#13 jennifer: for making good points, "stenography"
#3 nickD: for making sense throughout, post # 33 not selling notes
#24 Dmaze: 'money NOT education' point.
#5 larissa: "bootlegging statute", and for good copyright facts that I concur with, and for giving me an avenue for arguement :) needs to be more students like you.
#27, antinous: for, with nickD, mentioning ethics and "seediness".
#17 ben: point about making a website in lieu of going to class.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#110
Oh crap this is a long comment... sorry.
Aside from copyright issues, there's something else to consider that gets overlooked far too often.
Some people have a hard time learning from oral lectures. Different people have different learning styles, and a there are plenty of people with learning disabilities. What's the point in going to a lecture if the only reason you're there is to copy down notes. Lectures are a waste of time for some people, and those people have to put in extra time going over notes to learn the material. It's for this reason I think professors have a responsibility to make notes easily available for students. And in my experience, the best professors usually do (MIT OCW is an excellent example).
I have to say, I'm surprised that people think it's OK to charge students for a new text every year - we all know the text industry is a huge cash cow for SOMEBODY - but those students making a cottage industry out of passing around the same knowledge is supposed to be a bad thing? That doesn't quite click with me.
The professor may feel he's stopping dilution of education, but you know what? He's being payed by his students. If I buy milk, and I don't drink it, that's on me. If I buy a class and don't feel I need to consume it as dictated by the professor - or I can't come to class for whatever "legitimate" reason - I've still purchased his time and his material. Professors often fail to understand that those bratty froshes are their clients and patrons. If I pay a guy what a university charges per hour for his input on something, I've laid out enough money that he, IMO, works for me.
The several people here posting in defense or psuedo-defense of the professor are correct when they say it is easier to learn something, in general, from a teacher as opposed to learning it from a book. . . it had better be, or why pay teachers, right?
That doesn't mean, however, that legal action against students who eschew attendance is merited. Let's face it - this professor wants to sue paying students who aren't attending his classes in a way that pleases him. He's not legitimately worried about "bootlegging" to non-paying students, no one is going to buy notes for a class they aren't taking or going to take. That's like stairmaster suing people who buy a stairmaster and don't use it.
Students REGISTERED in the class have the right to the material, even if they snub an educator's ego by not showing up in the flesh. Besides, even assuming there is a copyright worthy product here, how is it infringement for one person to deliver the material to another for a fee? If the student receiving the notes has paid for the class, he has a right to the class materials, and is no more infringing copyright by paying for them, IMO, then he'd be infringing on copyright by paying Amazon to deliver a book.
I think professors have a responsibility to make notes easily available for students.
I give out notes when I teach a two hour meditation class. It costs me five cents per student and it means that they pay attention to me instead of scribbling while I'm talking. When I take a class for which I've paid a fee, I expect to receive notes. That's one of the biggest differences between a good class and a bad one. I'd even venture to say that the teacher who provides notes is probably better organized and a better presenter than one who doesn't.
I'm with @47 philentropist, in that getting completed notes pre- or post-class is often the best bet for some people with different learning styles.
I'm one of those people who can either write or listen to what's going on, but not both. If I'm taking notes, I'm missing what's being said now as I'm writing down what was said earlier. Therefore, my notes tend to be spotty at best and incoherent at worst, and more or less useless to me in general, as I'm struggling to write what I'm hearing without missing the next thing, and usually failing at both.
OTOH, if I have a completed outline in front of me to follow along with as the lecture proceeds, I learn the material twice as well as if I just sit there and listen. The effect is similar, but somewhat less effective, if I just sit there and listen, then read completed notes after.
There are some people for whom writing notes cements their learning. But for me, it prevents it. Ergo, my case is one in which buying the notes would be a legitimate purchase.
Since I'm paying good money to get an education, I fully expect to be allowed to do what it takes to get that education (short of cheating, of course), be that hiring a tutor, reviewing previous tests for study material or buying lecture notes.
If the prof were TRULY smart, he would have sold the originals to the company and made a profit. Silly professor...
I'm thinking of that Canadian student recently suspended by his university over a virtual study hall. Do students now typically create a secondary virtual lecture hall while the actual lecture is going on? Is this something done totally unconsciously and is the professor's work mutuated into something yet again new - even while he is teaching it?
I also believe it may still be legally wrong, #5, because universities own the copyright to works created within their walls. I know this is a FACT when it comes to student film.
Actually, at UF at least it all depends. For student films made through the Documentary Institute at the University of Florida, the students keep the copyright and can do whatever they want with the films they make, including releasing any or all of them under a Creative Commons license. I know this because I attended the Documentary Institute and we released our film under a CC license.
This professor may or may not even own the copyright to the text of his lectures and as a result may or may not be able to transfer the rights to them to anyone else; it all depends on the terms of employment in his department.
In any case, I doubt very much that summarizing what someone says runs afoul of copyright laws; else the gist of MLK's "I have a dream" speech would be as cost-prohibitive as the full text.
Oops. CITE tags don't work here; that first paragraph in my comment above was citing an earlier comment in the thread.
Outrageous. These are obviously derivative original works, he didn't create them because they're not verbatim copies.
Can he give the notes away? What about professors that upload videos of their lectures on the internet?
If a student's class notes are derivative works of a copyrighted lecture, then unless the students had a license to create a derivative work wouldn't they be in violation of the law for taking notes in the first place?
I wonder if the materials would be considered the property of the university, which employs the prof. Maybe they should sue him for trying to cash in on their IP. Either way, what a jerk.
#53 - I should have posted it 'could be' as opposed to it's a 'FACT', because it can be situationally dependant. USC kids can't do squat with their stuff online, for example, but UF kids apparently can with Documentary works. Good point.
Unless the prof is making all of his stuff up whole-cloth, his own lecture would be a derivative work based on what others in his field have done.
yeah?
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1a9_1207276309
Moulton is a dick anyway, I had his class and he publishes his own textbooks that cannot be reused after the semester by anyone else, just so that he can make more and more money each time he requires a student to buy his book for his class.
He is always taking vacations and letting his TAs do most of the in-class work he is defending under his "copyright".
All he ever wants is MORE MONEY.
To all the people who decry taking notes as "unethical":I, and several people I know, simply can't both write legibly and listen in class.Not to mention that my preferred way to "get" to the material is by understanding it from the base up rather then learning it by rote.So instead of taking notes I participate heavily in class discussion, and photocopy notes from other people taking this class or who have taken it in previous years.I don't see anything ethically wrong with people selling their notes, although I prefer to get mine for free.
Also, @50:cheating isn't buying education, it's buying grades- since after cheating you won't know the material any better.A whole different beast- and very ugly one at that.
should be *copying* notes, obviously....
In the 1980's, Political Science Professor Mark Reader at Arizona State announce that his lectures were copyrighted--but not because he objected to for-profit note takers. It was because Accuracy in Academia was sending its McCarthyist goons to spy on professors suspected of being too leftist. This was during the Reagan years (pre deification), and ASU was one of several campuses where Reagan Youth were running amok.
Reader was trying to prevent A.I.A. from recording and/or republishing his lectures in their witch-hunting materials. One of those A.I.A. goons was Matthew Scully, who later became a speech writer for George W Bush.
If academic freedom is the motive, does that change the calculation here?
I'll post more background at http://www.halfheartedfanatic.com
#5: "Since the professor's lectures are, presumably, oral and not recorded, he has no copyright in them to begin with. We just studied this in our Copyright Law class - the professor used that very example."
Assume a lecture that is not already recorded. If the student records the professor's lecture verbatim (whether as an audio recording or as a transcript), then copyright does apply because the lecture has just been fixed in a tangible medium. That contemporaneous recording is not infringement (because copyright does not apply until the recording is made), but subsequent copies are.
Good luck on the exam.
In the US, typically:
1) The university owns the copyrights in all work undertaken by staff or administrative employees of the university. A careful HR department will make sure of this via an explicit assignment. Work-for-hire, in brief.
2) Students will own the copyrights in all of their own suitable works, unless such work is undertaken as an employee of the university. However, they will typically be construed to have granted the university an implied license for some limited uses, such as electronic checking for plagiarism.
3) Universities typically have boilerplate somewhere that claims they own the copyrights of their faculty employees, but that (by policy, not law) they will not enforce these rights.
Examples can be seen in the (highly recommended) UF general counsel Copyright FAQ, available at: http://www.generalcounsel.ufl.edu/faq/Copyright.pdf
Note that many of these folk will wear more than one hat – as both student and employee or both (academic) faculty and (administrative) employee. Ownership of copyright in these situations will vary with headgear.
Disclaimer: I study copyright (“Pimps and Ferrets”), but I’m a PhD, not a JD, relatively less interested in copyright after 1909, and not affiliated with UF in any way.
Last 3 posts = great.
My stance is that the 3rd party selling the distributed notes, taken by paying students of the university, is ethically wrong. I also believe it may still be legally wrong, #5, because universities own the copyright to works created within their walls. I know this is a FACT when it comes to student film. I wonder if this is applicable to the prof's lectures. Or (this is a stretch) if the performance of the lecture is copyright-able.
It's not. Universities do own the copyright to copyrightable works created within their walls (whether by express contract, or by the works-for-hire doctrine), but a purely oral work such as a lecture is just not protected by copyright. To get copyright protection for a work, it needs to be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression".
Lulu - it's true that if the lecture were recorded verbatim by the student, then it would be "fixed" and therefore copyrightable - but who takes notes verbatim? You could make that argument for audio recording, true, but not for class notes.
This has actually be worked out in the courts before, one case being at UCLA in the 1990's.
This is more of a trademark, or theft of personna, case. Presumably, the notes would have no particular value if the student merely researched the source materials his/her self and produced tutorial notes. The student's notes have value because they express, or purport to express, the professor's ideas and/or organization of the class material. Thus, the value is in the association of the professor's name with the notes.
For great coverage of this, read Corrynne McSherry's book, "Who Owns Academic Work."
As we said at my uni: Lectures are for people who cant read books. No sympathy for the sycophants who need to be told answers rather than look them up themselves from my end. Professors are only good for distributing bibliographies, imo.
But the legal aspects are more interesting. The notes could well be transcriptions of a recording of the event, which surely would be copyrighted. Would regret the implications of a decision in the profs favour, obviously, but something should be done to protect the integrity of student scholarship.
Scotfree @ 71:
That's about as intelligent as claiming that books are for deaf people with no memories.
Humans have more senses than vision, and there's no good reason to insist that we should get information--including information about what other people know--only through one of them. Books, much as I love the written word, cannot detect when the reader doesn't understand something; a skilled lecturer can, and can explain it in a different way, or stop to answer questions.
I also would challenge you to have provided, in anything like as timely a fashion, a book containing the material in (for example, from memory) the lecture that one of my history professors gave in November 1982. The course was "History of the Soviet Union, 1917-present." The topic was the death of Leonid Brezhnev, and what effects it was likely to have. The professor had learned of this event when he was awakened by a telephone call from a German radio station, asking him to comment on the event. Many of us learned about it when the lecture started.
Lectures are for people who cant read books.
and there's no good reason to insist that we should get information--including information about what other people know--only through one of them.
People who are primarily auditory or kinesthetic don't learn well by reading, so you're both right. Even if the professor just reads the book to the class, for an auditory person that's a better learning tool than staring at the page. The perfect class for me would be a textbook and an e-mail address where I could submit questions. Some people learn solely from the lectures. If you're strongly kinesthetic....maybe you should consider massage school instead.
Yes, but teach a man to fish, after all, don't just give him one.
Now I am well aware people learn in different ways, and it would be lovely if there was a separate presentation of material for each individual learning style. This was done as far as was practical on an undergraduate level at my university [where i was constantly told off then given dispensation for my horrendous attendence record] by every student in the department being assigned a professor with whom one would meet once every week or two as a tutor. When, as again was the case at my uni, the emphasis is not on mindless recitation of facts, but on the survey and analysis of them, lectures become either showcases for a professors narcissism or chores for all involved, because, barring the exceptional circumstances mentioned above, professors are not particularly party to more information than a student, except insomuch as, when asked a question, a professor ought at least to know where to find an answer, which is the sort of thing that /should/ be taught. It would of course be different if more than one student in an hundred could be arsed to read the material, or had any sort of critical aptitude, or, as every adult should be able to do, was capable of assessing what needs to be done and do it, but there it is: students tend to be stupid and lazy, hence lectures. The same as buying jeans from wall-mart [they never fit right], the problem is massification, and most students would be much better off finding proper jobs instead of wasting everyone's time in a classroom.
gods! I suffered through FAR too many BAD lectures....
most students would be much better off finding proper jobs instead of wasting everyone's time in a classroom.
I would fully support spending one's teens and twenties getting high and laid, then going to school at thirty or so when you have some idea of what you might like to do with your red-eyed, herpes-ridden self.
I feel that it is very distasteful for a professor to require his own book to be bought by the students of his class.
There is no legitimate justification for this. Any such professor has on his computer somewhere a PDF file of his book and such a professor could just give every student in his class an electronic version of it. The only purpose for requiring the students to buy the book is to make himself money.
They are his students! What kind of teacher aims to get money out of the people in his classes?
I come from the Australian system which I believe is a bit different to the U.S. system in this respect. My understanding is that in the U.S. pretty much every course has a required text. Here in Australia, hardly any classes have a required textbook. Rather, the courses follow notes written by the professor, or well-established class notes (possibly written by someone else in the department a few years earlier). These notes are either printed by the university and obtained by paying a nominal fee (to cover the printing cost), or obtained electronically directly from the web, or, the students share the job of acting as scribe, and the resulting notes are posted week to week on the lecturer's webpage.
Indeed, the only class I've ever had which had a ``required textbook'' which needed to be bought was a class run by an American professor who had just written a book.
One system isn't necessarily better than the other, but I find the idea that the students should be giving their professors money in the form of buying their textbooks quite shady.