O O Ø O O O O
Rock Star
Michael Moulton busted his butt in a dark, smoky room, cranking out a series of little masterpieces. He took a couple of years to groove his performance, but eventually was able to catch the eye of a promoter. He painstakingly recorded his gems, and assembled them into a collection that he could sell to his adoring fans. He continued to perform his work, flogging his new “merch” to his adoring fans, and his fans continued to pay sky-high prices to see him.
Then one day, some jerk recorded his stuff, and started selling it on the Internet, at a discount.
Michael Moulton sued the jerk for copyright violation, and everyone lived happily ever after.
A cute story, to be true, but not particularly original in the world of Rock ‘n Roll. The only thing is, Michael Moulton isn’t a rock star—he’s an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida;his works aren’t singles—they’re Lecture Notes; and his fans aren’t fans—they’re University students.
Assistant Professor Michael Moulton is suing a note-taking company for publishing notes taken during his University lectures. In other words, Michael Moulton is claiming notes taken during his lectures are derivative works of his intellectual property. And here I thought University Professors were supposed to be teaching. It turns out, they’re performing.
And that’s where I get annoyed. Isn’t the whole point of having a lecture to teach people? Isn’t the point of taking notes to aid in that process. Do we really care what the source material is if the students are actually learning?
Michael, if your performances are really that good, why isn’t anyone showing up to take their own notes? If it’s such valuable intellectual property, why does MIT give it away for free?
If we continue down this path, university professors will soon start suing each other for basing their Calculus-I lectures on other peoples’ work (Newton’s estate, take note). Pretty soon, nobody will be teaching at all—we’ll all be renting our university educations from Netflix.
Kjell Wooding
April 8, 2008
OOØOOOODCCCLXVIII
April 15th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Sad to say the least. If he was worried because he was planning on publishing his notes as a textbook I might partially understand it. I guess he’s annoyed because someone is making money off the notes? If he printed them he could publish them himself, oh wait that’s textbook like. hmmmm. I remember a CompSci course where the profs stuff was in a ring bound book that you needed to buy. It was done through campus publishing.
The good thing about the Netflix approach is that you won’t have all those annoying textbooks for courses you will never use again, because you’d have to return them at some point. Can you rent enough courses at one time to fill semester? At least there wouldn’t be late fees.