Tonight Slashdot posted a story about Grey Davis, governor of California, signing a bill at the end of September that effectively makes it illegal to offer lecture notes from California public and private universities for sale on the Internet. The Daily Californian has an article summarizing the bill.
As I’ve mentioned I work at a public university and my wife is almost finished with her masters and has taught (and plans to teach) Medieval Studies classes at the university level. As a result, we’ve been following intellectual property issues relating to universities pretty closely.
Anyway, the university rhetoric that this bill is designed to protect students seems like a load of nonsense. The Daily Californian article actually quotes people as saying all they want to do is quality assurance — people might buy notes on the Internet and rely on them not knowing that the person making the notes barely pulled a C in the class.
And so what if they do? If somebody is dumb enough to a) buy notes rather than go to class and b) not realize the notes are shoddy, then c) he or she deserves precisely whatever grade is awarded. That would seem to be an excellent way to weed out people who don’t belong in college at all.
This is really about universities exerting control over what they feel is their intellectual property, but it’s not always so cut and dried where intellectual property begins and ends. For example, I made quite a bit of money selling people my notes, old papers, and occasionally even writing “sample” papers for my fellow students who had more money than brains. Yet my notes were hardly a mere transcript of the class since usually I had very strong differences of opinion with my professors. I would argue that in many cases my notes were in fact original works rather than the property of the professor.
You have to wonder how far they want to take this. Suppose I take a basic American history class, for example, and post my notes online for sale. Is a court really going to buy the argument that a given professor’s listing of the progression of say the Civil War is so original that the notes are a copyright owned by the university?
Using the same “we have to protect the students” you could just as easily pass a law banning people from offering tutoring services for classes without approval, since the best tutors are usually just repeating the intellectual property of the professor in a way that the person being tutored can actually understand (most professors I’ve met are pretty smart, but not necessarily very good public speakers).
It isn’t too far from asserting notes of a lecture as copyrighted to asserting a copyright over actual essays and other things produced as part of a class. There was always that one professor who refused to return papers or tests — maybe they could extend that to cover ownership of papers.
Finally, the Daily Californian article notes that one of the universities that hires its own note taking firm to sell notes online lets professors review the notes for accuracy. One thing it doesn’t mention is what sort of revenue sharing scheme they have (or if they share revenues from online notes with professors at all). There is an ongoing battle, occasionally legal, about ownership of intellectual property produced by professors, especially when it comes to online content.
Universities don’t want to hire somebody to design them a state-of-the art web site say on 16th century art only to have the professor hop to another university and create a very similar site there. On the other hand, professors definitely do not feel they are creating such content on a work-for-hire basis. The whole problem gets much more complicated since labor costs are causing universities to hire a lot of short-term faculty who don’t have long term contracts and generally fewer rights and options within the university system.
In many ways it’s not that different from the situation with music where you have different actors (such as record companies, musicians and online MP3 sites) that often have a varied mix of motives and allegiances, along with often convoluted systems of intellectual property rights.
The thing that amuses me most about this is that if you work at a university, private or public, there is a definite attitude that academia is superior to private business precisely because it is supposedly not motivated to always seek a higher profit. I can’t tell you the number of times somebody has told me that universities can act nobly in one way or another because they don’t always have to go for the throat to make a profit.
People who think this are deluded. Having worked for large corporations and large educational institutions, the only difference really is that the people working at large corporations generally don’t kid themselves — they know they’re there to make as much money for the company as possible — whereas those working at academic institutions tell themselves they’re more noble, but they often act in ways that are often far more crass and petty than what I’ve seen at profit-oriented corporations.