I suppose if faculty deliberately choose to misunderstand their role and torment students, they’re free to do so. As Wired reports, another faculty member is claiming that notes students take in his class infringe his intellectual property rights. Michael Moulton, pictured right, and his publisher Faulkner Press (no link love for you!) are asserting what they suppose to be their right to control what students do with the information he teaches in his classes. While this all seems very confusing, the lawyer representing his publisher (a Mr. Sullivan) makes it quite clear:
But if a professor’s lectures are copyrighted, aren’t students already infringing just by taking the notes in the first place?
Yes, Sullivan answers, student notes do infringe, but they are protected infringement.
Ever wonder why students hate teachers? Try telling your students that their class notes infringe your copyright.
We may assume that Prof. Moulton’s / Faulkner Press’s understanding of fair use, or “protected infringement,” is restricted to educational circumstances. The use of student notes from his class for profit-making purposes is all that bothers them. And surely that’s appropriate, right?
Then, once students graduate and go on to employment, what should happen to these class notes whose infringement was once protected? When students take these infringing notes out of the educational setting and into the workplace with them for “review,” surely the protection those dastardly, infringing notes enjoyed in the dorm room finally disappears, doesn’t it? If a graduate is hired by a company, and course-related information makes it’s way into the corporation, that organization might financially benefit from the professor’s intellectual property – without the professor’s or publisher’s permission and without the professor or publisher receiving any compensation! Oh, the humanity! This growing crisis in the academy leads me to ask:
What can be done about the slow, leaking escape of faculty knowledge out of universities via graduating students?
In other words, how can we isolate and contain faculty intellectual property, so that enough students pass exams that our departments maintain their accreditations, but we guarantee that students leave with no more information or expertise than they entered with?
Oh, wait. THAT’S THE WHOLE FREAKING POINT OF THE UNIVERSITY.
The teaching act is a sharing act. I’ll say it again. The teaching act is a sharing act. To hold the sacred title of “faculty” means to be a person who dedicates his or her life to making sure that every student you come in contact with takes with them as much of your knowledge, skills, expertise, and positive attitudes as possible when they graduate. It means to work to facilitate and mediate student learning. It means to enculturate those students as deeply into your professional community and practice as possible. There is simply NO place for selfishness, for withholding, for secrecy, or especially for threats of legal action against students for taking, sharing, or even – gasp – selling – class notes. If it helps students learn what you’re tying to teach, why would you interfere???
The only answer can be that student learning is no longer your first priority. And that’s sad.
The distinctions will slowly become clearer and clearer. The “free market” of student registrations will declare open educators who truly teach and share of themselves with students to be the winners, while the intellectual misers will be left to sit alone in their ivory towers counting their publications, unable to understand why students no longer sign up for their classes (or attend the universities whose policies uphold these attitudes) and unable to understand that they don’t own the copyrights in their publications – the publishers do.
It’s unclear how much of this lawsuit is Moulton’s publisher, and how much of it is him. We expect this kind of behavior from publishers. Let’s hope that Moulton is just caught in the crossfire here. But if a person is concerned about protecting their intellectual property, teaching just isn’t the right profession for them. They need to find a new one.