From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Putting Class Notes on the Web--Are Companies Stealing Le
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 19:25:30 -0500
Putting Class Notes on the Web: Are Companies Stealing Lectures?
By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK
Much to the distress of some professors and their employers, operators of at
least three commercial World-Wide Web sites have begun to feature notes
taken in classes on dozens of campuses.
The site operators pay students to post notes from their courses. Like so
many of the other new college-oriented Web sites that seek to attract
students' attention by offering academic content, the sites are for-profit
ventures laden with advertising.
The notes on at least two of the sites, www.StudentU.com
(http://www.StudentU.com) and Versity.com (http://Versity.com), are
available free, although Versity.com requires users to register to see notes
from any but the first few meetings of the semester. The notes sites also
feature services such as links to other academic resources and reference
sites.
A third site, Study24-7.com (http://Study24-7.com), requires users to
register before they can view any notes at all. In addition to the notes, it
offers links to games and on-line shopping.
The commercialization of class notes is hardly new: Notes companies have
been common -- and controversial -- on some large campuses since the 1960s.
At some, notes services even operate under the auspices of the student
government.
Still, many university leaders and professors say this latest permutation is
particularly annoying -- and unnerving.
"For people to come along who do not ask for permission, who do not pay for
permission, and then make a profit off what is the product of another
person's mind is outrageous morally and infringement legally," says Robert
A. Gorman, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one
of the authors of a recent statement by the American Association of
University Professors on intellectual-property rights of professors.
"There's nothing much more personal than than your lecture material," says
Richard J. Lutz, senior associate dean at the University of Florida graduate
school.
"As an individual faculty member, I find it rather distasteful," says Mr.
Lutz, who also teaches marketing. His class is among 70 or so at Florida
from which one of the companies, StudentU.com, expects to post notes.
The emergence of these sites, say some, also has the potential to alter the
character of college teaching, by changing the "exposure" of a class
lecture.
"It's like putting a camera in every classroom," says Christine Helwick,
general counsel for the California State University system, which has
several campuses where class notes are slated to be posted. "There was never
an expectation that what a professor taught in a classroom would be
disseminated to the world."
While the law is hardly clear-cut, some colleges and organizations contend
that taking notes from a class lecture and putting them on line on a
commercial Web site violates professors' copyright.
Administrators at Kansas State University, for instance, have advised
faculty members that professors own the common-law copyright on their
lectures, and that "the mere delivery of the lecture does not effect a
divestiture of the copyright" (The Chronicle, September 17).
The university's lawyer, Richard Seaton, has also prepared a statement that
professors can attach to their syllabi if they choose to. The statement
reads: "Copyright 1999 [professor's name] as to this syllabus and all
lectures. Students are prohibited from selling (or being paid for taking)
notes during this course to or by any person or commercial firm without the
express written permission of the professor teaching this course."
Other institutions where the sites are operating, or plan to -- including
the Universities of Florida and Houston -- may also take some action on
copyright grounds, according to their lawyers or provosts.
Meanwhile, James Richardson, the president of the American Association of
University Professors, says he plans to have the organization's Academic
Freedom committee, or perhaps a special committee, look into the matter.
"What you say in a class is your own intellectual property," says Mr.
Richardson, a professor of sociology and judicial studies at the University
of Nevada at Reno. "We do think there are some legal rights at stake here."
Mr. Richardson, who is also a lawyer, says it would be interesting if a
professor sued one or several of the companies on copyright-infringement
grounds.
Proving copyright infringement in such instances, however, isn't so easy.
The University of Florida learned that in 1993, when it unsuccessfully sued
a traditional note-taking company. A jury in a federal district court
concluded that most statements that a professor makes in a lecture can be
categorized as facts or ideas that do not belong to anyone.
And work that builds on the writings of someone else is generally not
considered a violation of the original creator's copyright. So unless the
postings closely replicate what the professors say, the new Internet sites
might not violate a professor's copyright either, some lawyers say.
But Mr. Seaton, Kansas State's lawyer, says he expects most of the sites
would indeed violate copyright. "The whole idea," he notes, "is to try to
reproduce, in capsule form, what the professor said.
"If you start transforming it and making original creations, you're not
actually accomplishing your purpose." In other words, the better the notes,
the more likely they violate a professor's copyright.
Operators of the sites insist that their sites don't pose copyright issues.
At Versity.com, a company created last year by four University of Michigan
undergraduates, the goal is not to provide a verbatim transcript but "a
high-quality interpretation" of the class, according to Jeff Lawson, one of
the founders. The notes, he says, should reflect what "a good, diligent
student takes out of a lecture."
The company expects to operate on 90 campuses this fall, carrying notes from
50 to 75 courses -- although it offered notes from only a few courses as of
last week.
The four founders, who say they are all within a few credits of graduating,
have decided to halt their studies to focus full time on their company. The
decision apparently hasn't cost them too many friends at their alma mater.
Last week the company announced it had received some $11-million in
venture-capital financing -- including $75,000 from the Wolverine Fund,
which is managed by graduate-business-school students at Michigan.
Oran Wolf, StudentU.com's founder, says his site encourages note takers to
"communicate in their own way." His company, which began providing paper
notes and exam reviews to disabled students and athletes in 1995, expects to
operate on more than 60 campuses. The notes for many of the courses it hopes
to cover also are not yet on line.
StudentU.com and Versity.com pay students a flat fee of $300 a course for
posting notes. Study24-7.com asks its note takers to organize chat rooms and
on-line class discussions, and gives the note takers a percentage of the
advertising revenue on the site under a schedule that rewards them for
generating more traffic onto the site. The company, which began operations
in January, had at least some kind of a presence on 400 institutions last
spring, says Brian Maser, its co-founder.
The companies say they screen note takers based on their grades and other
factors. And while it's impossible to generalize about the quality of the
notes -- it is as variable as each note taker's ability and industriousness
-- few appear to provide more than a simple outline of the lecture. And in
some cases, less than that. Consider a sample from the StudentU.com site for
an introductory psychology class at Cal State at Long Beach. An excerpt
(with spelling and punctuation verbatim) reads:
"the assumptions psychologists make dictate how people are treated, this is
a reoccuring theme/impericle meaning to touch and feel, is the opposite of
theoreticle meaning thoughts/ psychologist who believe in this style of
thought is Wundt, Wilhelm-Von Helmholtz, Herman-and Fechner, Gustav./ in the
late 1800's psychology came to america by William James, who broke away from
the impericle view, and expanded it ..."
The companies, which tend to focus on large lecture courses, say they don't
post professors' syllabi or handouts on the sites, out of
copyright-infringement concerns. The companies also advise students that the
notes posted on line do not necessarily reflect the professors' points of
view and should not be used in lieu of attending classes. As StudentU.com's
site puts it: "You need to know that the lecture notes you find in
StudentU.com are just a notetaker's interpretation of what was presented in
the lecture. THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY NOT THE PROFESSOR'S LECTURE
NOTES. They didn't come from the Professor -- not from the Teacher -- not
from the T.A. -- not even from Santa."
Glib disclaimers notwithstanding, some professors still believe the sites
infringe on copyright.
Arguments that the notes are merely "interpretive" are legal "baloney," says
Mr. Gorman, the law professor from Penn. The topics professors select, the
language they use, the structure of their lecture -- "all of those things
are protectable intellectual property," he says.
Although for the most part professors, not colleges, own the intellectual
property that makes up a class lecture, Mr. Gorman says universities should
"go to bat for the faculty member" and help press legal cases against these
"rip-off operations." Universities "have got to recognize that they've got
an interest here," he says.
Meanwhile, some professors -- but by no means all -- are watching the
companies with trepidation.
Caroline Goeser is among the wary. A visiting assistant professor of art at
the University of Houston, Ms. Goeser says she "had no idea" that her
fall-semester Art History II course was slated to be included on
StudentU.com until told by a reporter. "I don't feel good at all" about it,
she says, even though no notes from the course have yet appeared on line.
Ms. Goeser says she fears students will rely on the Web site instead of
attending class, and if they do so, they'll miss out on her discussion of
slides, and class participation. Even with 160 students, she says, "I don't
just lecture." She worries that the notes won't accurately represent what's
going on in her classroom.
The idea that someone could publish her academic ideas without her
permission or knowledge is also unsettling, she says. That's not a big issue
in a survey course like Art History II, she says, because most of the
material there is pretty basic. But in courses where she discusses her
original scholarship, it could pose a problem.
"Just last week, I talked about my dissertation in my upper-level class,"
she says. The dissertation, on an artist of the Harlem Renaissance, is still
unpublished.
J. Houston McCulloch, professor of economics and finance at the Ohio State
University, says he too finds the companies' practices disconcerting. Some
lectures for a finance class slated to be listed on StudentU.com are based
on his as-yet unpublished textbook. "If they put the substance of the book
on the Web, someone else could copy my book," he says.
The sites do, however, have defenders within the professoriate.
Aaron C. Ahuvia, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of
Michigan at Dearborn, helped the Versity.com founders test-market their site
last year, when he taught at the university's Ann Arbor campus. He says he
has few qualms about posting class notes on the Web, or even about the
notion that a company is making money off of them.
"Everybody is making profit off my work," says Mr. Ahuvia, who notes that he
doesn't get paid for publishing a scholarly article -- or providing insights
to journalists who write for newspapers. "As a professor, I want to have
some control over my ideas, but I also want to disseminate my ideas. That's
what I'm about."
He says he doubts students will rely on the notes instead of going to class,
because "they'll learn that it doesn't work."
Mr. Ahuvia says he's fond of a Versity.com feature that lets users search on
a topic, such as hegemony, and find what professors all over the country say
about it. While he also acknowledges that student notes might not be as
reliable a source for such information as, say, scholarly literature, the
feature could be useful to students "as a quick reference."
B. Joseph White, the dean of the business school at Ann Arbor, says he's
impressed with Versity.com because of the other academic links and features
on the site. And he says the presence of the class notes doesn't bother him.
"I remember when course evaluations [by students] were considered an
outrage, too."
And that's not just rhetoric. Mr. White says he believes in the company so
strongly, he may even invest in it himself.
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education