Websites that offer or sell lecture notes are springing up across the Internet. Is this copyright infringement? Does it encourage students to cut class? And who do the notes belong to anyway? An interesting piece about the role and future of the lecture:
FreeHarvardEducation.com – The Boston Globe
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This is just one worm out of a can that contains many, all with one thing in common; what does ownership of intellectual property mean in the Web 2.9 age? The Copyright Act of 1976 says that when you create something and embody it in a ‘fixed form’, you own the rights to that creation, and to ‘derivative works’. Are my notes on your lecture a derivative work? Probably depends on how accurate a note taker I am, and on the judge making the ‘judgment calls’ (pun intended). What I mean is that the even the best written laws must be clarified through case law before we can see how it’ll be applied in the real world. So stay tuned…I expect we’ll see one of these IP cases before the Supreme Court in a few years.
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Dwight, good points. This is an area that is currently very muddy. I had a conversation with some higher ed folks yesterday, and they are moving ahead on lecture capture. The questions are both about lecture content, which seems to be clearly the faculty’s IP, and the notes. If we were a creative commons licensing org, we could let people say whether derivative works are allowed or not. It seems unfair if someone makes a derivative work and then cashes in on it big time, and the originator gets no credit and no royalties. I think this was the Dan Brown DaVinci Code suit was about….