Firm offers notes from UM classes over the Internet

Emily Phillips
Montana Kaimin

It sounds like a good deal all around.

Students who don’t go to class can get notes off the Internet for free, and students who go to class can get paid for taking notes.

Meanwhile, advertisers can cash in on a website that is visited almost exclusively by college students.

But UM Attorney David Aronofsky said online note-taking services, like versity.com, study247.com and studentU.com might put students in uncomfortable—and illegal—situations.

Copyright laws surrounding intellectual property have not been completely tested, Aronofsky said.

“No two campuses seem to treat this alike,” he said. “Around the country it’s unsettled.”

The University of Vermont, the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University have all taken action against Internet note services. Aronofsky said he thinks the actions of those universities are just the beginning.

According to UM’s collective bargaining agreement, faculty members “retain full editorial control over and intellectual property rights to the content” of the lectures and things they prepare for classes.

Aronofsky said faculty complaints would be viewed with “sympathy” because of the language in the bargaining agreement.

Aronofsky also said professors could easily sue students who post bad or inaccurate notes online for damaging their reputation.

“They’d have an open-and-shut lawsuit against the student,” he said. “The student doesn’t have a prayer in that kind of a case.”

Mike Mcgowan, versity.com’s UM campus manager, said students wouldn’t be held liable for intellectual property law violations. Every student hired by the company as a note-taker has to go through an hour and a half of training about what they can and cannot publish.

“Professors aren’t inventing the Pythagorean Theorum,” he said.

Mcgowan and other employees at versity.com check the notes for format, spelling and complete information.

Lisa Matz, a junior in business marketing, is one of 30 students on campus taking notes for versity.com, which just added UM to its website this semester. Matz makes $7 every time she goes to psychology class, as long as she e-mails her notes to the company within 24 hours.

“Actually, I got 100 percent on the test that I took the notes for,” she said. “And I’m not usually an A student.”

Matz, who also works on a marketing team for versity.com, said her notes are not intended for students who skip class. They are supposed to serve as an extra resource for students who have already been to class.

“There’s always going to be people who abuse it,” she admitted.

Mcgowan agreed.

“If you skip class you’re not going to be able to pick up the notes and pass the class,” he said.

Matz said she signed a contract when she took her job with versity.com promising to put all the notes into her own words and not copy exactly what the professor writes on the board. She was also promised she is not liable for any legal action the university takes against her.

“Really the note-takers are not legally responsible at all,” she said. “You don’t really have to ask the professor (for permission).”

ASUM used to sell notes, but never without permission from professors.

Don Loftsgaarden, a math professor, checked versity.com for notes from his statistics classes and reported they were “very poor.”

“At best they were a sketchy outline of the book,” Loftsgaarden said.

He said the examples, video segments and software demonstrations he uses in class were nowhere to be found.

“This is an elementary course,” he said. “But virtually I could see nothing in there (on the site) that wouldn’t be in the book. You wouldn’t get much there if you were trying to pass the class from what was there.”

Political Science Professor Jim Lopach said he had no idea the notes for his class were online. He said he won’t take any action against versity.com for publishing them, but he would support action taken by the administration.

“I put a tremendous amount of time into the notes,” Lopach said.

About two-thirds of the 150 students enrolled in his Introduction to American Government class show up for his class lectures, Lopach said. That number has remained steady since the notes first appeared online at the beginning of this semester.

“I think that coming to class is essential for complete learning,” he said. “I see this as a shortcut.”

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