Secondary market for class notes: copyrighted free speech or lazy cheater's dream?
Thursday, April 12, 2012
"Do Students Have Copyright to Their Own Notes?"
This is a decent article by Tina Barseghian of KQED’s Mindshift blog, but unfortunately it isn’t cynical enough for me. It talks about school policies banning the sharing or selling of class notes. It sets up the dichotomy of a professor’s right to be free from unvetted transcriptions of their lecture and a student’s copyright in the original bits of their notes, touching on free speech implications along the way.
Some school policies (and the criticisms attacking them) may confuse these issues. Most, however, appear to ban sharing or selling any part of your notes, whether you transcribed the lecture or only wrote down your own thoughts on the material.
My problem with the article itself is Barseghian doesn’t mention one of the most important caveats to the professors’ reputations/students’ copyrights/students’ free speech conundrum: that not all students sharing and selling notes are innocently “sharing knowledge” or innocently trying to get their First Amendment on.
Some students “borrow” or buy notes because they are lazy or cheating, or both. Sure, somewhere in the middle there are students who do their own work and choose to supplement it with third-party notes. But I’m too cynical to believe the lazy cheaters aren’t in the majority.