Who Owns Your Class Notes? Cal State Threatens Students Who Sell Their Notes

SongLifter points us to the news that the California State University system has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the site NoteUtopia, for enabling students to buy and sell various class notes (among other things). On top of that, it has sent emails to students at its universities, warning them that using a site like NoteUtopia can result in discipline -- including expulsion. There is, in fact, a provision California State education code that prohibits preparing, selling, transferring, distributing or publishing notes or recordings of lectures for "any commercial purpose."

Now, I'm sure some will defend this as either (1) a way to stop cheating or (2) because of the supposed, if ambiguously explained "evils" of "commercial use," but it does seem a bit troubling to threaten the website itself for this, or to tell students that they cannot sell their own notes. The threat of "cheating," via others' notes has always seemed overblown to me. You still need to actually learn the material to pass the class, and if you can learn it better via the notes of others, more power to you. I would guess that it's actually harder to do things that way since the very act of note taking is what helps many people learn in the first place. As for the commercial use issue, again, I'm sort of at a loss for why this matters? If there really is a market for notes, then what, exactly, is the problem?

In the end, I'm just left scratching my head in wondering why the university system should care about this at all, when in most cases, all this will do is provide another source of information for students who wish to learn something.

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Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101020/11574011510/who-owns-your-class-notes-cal-state-threatens-students-who-sell-their-notes.shtml

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