There's Gold in Them Thar Notes!

Inside Higher Ed has a piece on a new social networking service called Knetwit. The hook for this one is that it's a place where people can exchange their class notes. The IHE piece has an interesting discussion of whether this is a copyright violation of professorial work product, and the comments following the piece offer a wide range of views on why professors should or should not care whether notes from their classes are showing up there.

Just as with DocStoc, it looks like the current inventory is confined to just a few schools. And Knetwit doesn't seem to have made any inroads into law school yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.

I don't see too much to get upset about here, though. Students have been buying and selling each other notes for a long time. When I was in law school, students took their notes to a local copyshop to leave on file there. You could go get any one of a dozen students' notes for any given course. I sold my notes in high school and law school. I never considered what I did any kind of violation of the professor's copyright. I was basically a transcription/notetaking service (a rationalization, perhaps), and I charged people based on the value of the transcription, not based on the value of the subject matter or presentation of it. I took the view when I was in school that I continue to take now that I'm a faculty member/administrator: If you think that having the notes of someone who performed well in a class will magically transfer that same level of performance to you, then you don't understand the point of taking notes.

I guess I sort of understand the copyright argument about notes, but it's not as if the student is going to turn those notes in a study guide, submit it to a textbook publisher, and then make money from anothers' work. Also, it's hard to imagine a professor saying, "I assign the study guide to XYZ Text, but the student recorded notes on Knetwit are just as good." With all due respect to the many very intelligent law students out there, I just don't believe that a law student can produce something from the notes that's going to actually cut into the market of whatever the law professor wants to do with her work product. Nor do I think they have the time or attention to do that, even if they wanted to.

It'll be interesting to see where this one goes.