Putting Class Notes on the Web: Are Companies Stealing
Lectures?
Professors say new ventures make a profit by using scholars'
work without permission
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, http://www.studentu.com/ and 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, 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.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Page: A31
