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Not note-worthy at Princeton
Long-standing policy keeps Versity.com off campus
By DANA PASTERNAK
Princetonian Staff Writer
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Photo by Georgia Garthwaite |
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recent controversy at Yale University has brought Versity.com — an
Internet company that provides lecture notes for courses at about
150 colleges and universities nationwide — to the forefront of a
continuing debate over professors' intellectual property rights.
Versity.com pays students for their lecture notes and then
makes the notes available online. At most schools, however, the
company does not seek the permission of professors from whose
courses material is posted.
Versity.com pulled all notes
from courses at Yale last month, several days after the university
demanded that it do so. "Yale sent Versity.com a cease and desist
order objecting to what they were doing," according to a statement
by Yale Assistant Director for Institutional Issues Thomas Violante.
"They complied and took down the Yale notes. We said we will meet
with them at a later date."
Versity.com manager of campus
relations Jennifer Keesler explained the company's reason for
pulling the material from the site. "We removed the notes because we
respect the students, faculty and administration at Yale," she said.
"Beyond that, we hope this leads to us learning more about their
needs."
Though the Website allows users to get notes for
about 7,000 classes, it does not offer notes from any Princeton
courses.
According to Keesler, the company does not play a
role on the Princeton campus because of a lack of student interest.
Versity.com did not receive the "overwhelming student demand for
notes" from Princeton undergraduates that it had from students at
other schools, she said.
Dean of Undergraduate Students
Kathleen Deignan said she believes this lack of demand is the result
of specific University regulations that preclude the sale of lecture
notes. "The University has a policy that long predated Versity.com,"
she said.
This policy appears in "Rights, Rules,
Responsibilities" and states, "Students may not engage in the
publication or sale of abstracts or transcriptions of the lectures
or required reading in any course of instruction in the University."
When a Versity.com recruitment advertisement appeared in The
Daily Princetonian this fall, the administration sent a campus-wide
e-mail and placed an advertisement in the 'Prince' to remind
students of the University policy, Deignan noted.
"We felt
it was incumbent on us to go out there and to make people aware of
the fact that this was a longstanding policy of the University," she
said.
Deignan said there had not been any problems with the
policy, though one student who had volunteered to work for
Versity.com approached her as soon as the administration's e-mail
and ad were released. The student said he would not pursue the job
and did not receive any disciplinary punishment.
While Yale
chose to deal directly with the company, Deignan said Princeton has
handled the Versity.com situation differently than other schools. "I
think Princeton's approach has been to deal with our own community
rather than to try and enter into some external action against
Versity.com," she said.
University General Counsel Howard
Ende said he believed professors' intellectual property claims were
"viable," but not something considered by the University. "It's not
one we needed to look at since we felt it was already addressed by
our policies," he noted.
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