College kids, take note

Not to disparage a new grad’s entrepreneurial dreams, but it’s hard to imagine why college students would go to NoteUtopia.com to buy lecture notes and old homework, even though the prices are only $1 to $3. The chances of finding the right notes for a particular class for a particular course at a particular college would be pretty small; isn’t it a lot easier just to ask a classmate?

Yet California State University has sent a cease-and-desist letter to NoteUtopia founder Ryan Stevens, warning him and Cal State students about a little-known state law that prohibits students from selling their lecture notes. Under the law, students may not record classroom proceedings without the professor’s permission — no audio, no webcams. Handwritten notes may be shared with classmates, but they may not be sold. The theory behind the law is that professors have spent considerable time developing their lectures for the use of their students, not for public dissemination or for sale.

The law goes too far, though. If the notes belong to the students who jotted them down, the state has no business interfering with what they do with them — share or sell (assuming they could actually find a buyer). And copyright laws already exist to protect the professor’s words from being copied more or less verbatim without permission, or otherwise published without the professor’s permission.

Information and thoughts are a different matter. If students take notes in their own words, recording concepts to make the information easier to learn and retain, those notes should belong to them, just as if they were reviewing a play they had seen or creating a new version of SparkNotes. And though it’s nice to think that they would share those notes for free in the academic spirit of edifying others, the choice should be theirs. If professors object to students relying on others’ notes instead of attending class, they can take roll or make class participation part of the grade.

One professor at Cal State San Bernardino objected to the bad quality of some of the notes on NoteUtopia, and would-be customers should certainly be aware that they might get an inferior product. Few outstanding students are going to publish the results of their hard work for too little money even to buy a latte. But then, college students waste money from time to time. It’s all part of learning.