<p>You all are totally missing the point. If notes are work, then you cannot, under any circumstances, share your notes with another student. You can't study with them and tell them what your notes say, you can't help them if they just miss one class, you can't do anything with them that lets another student have access. If notes are NOT work (and they likely aren't, otherwise damn near every college student would be in violation of his/her honor code just for studying with someone else), then you can buy/sell them as you would with anything else, depending on the intellectual property issues. Thus, you all can stop saying that notes are "academic work", because if they are then no students can study togather, etc..., or otherwise they too are sharing academic work and are every bit as guilty as someone who sells notes of violating the academic integrity code.</p>
<p>Secondly, as most universities policies are currently written, and as most professors publicly/in writing define what constitues "work" for the purposes of cheating/etc., sharing notes would not be cheating in any way - otherwise, as shown above, studying with someone else/etc. would be cheating. Could they amend the rules to block this? Sure, they could, but they would need to have VERY careful wording to get away with it.</p>
<p>Thirdly, ryanbis, you have 0 idea of how intellectual property works. The lectures and their content would NEVER be the universities property, they would be the individual professor's property - and you can look this up if you don't believe me. Further, not all lectures are protected by copyright (in my estimation, most aren't) - and if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe the University of Texas system, which has a webpage about commercial note taking for its faculty members that states:
[quote]
If a faculty member lectures from an outline or notes, or just "wings it," federal copyright law does not protect the lecture and the faculty member will not be able to assert federal rights against anyone.<a href="from%20%5Burl%5Dhttp://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/lectures.htm%5B/url%5D">/quote</a></p>
<p>While the site does explain how most states individually protect the copyrights of professors, it would be very easy for those selling notes to make such suits a major pain in the ass - do it on the web, or get a buddy in a faraway state (preferably one that doesn't have protective common law copyrights) to make a webpage, make the terms of use for the notes such that any suits resulting from note usage must take place in said faraway state, and then see what happens. I think you're very naive if you think most professors would go through all the trouble of a large lawsuit to get a student who did this - each professor would have to file their own suit, probably pay for their own lawyer, and might have to file suit in another state/county and hope that it even works. It is not a "slam dunk" in any event, barring something like a professor recording every lecture (and keeping the recordings to prove that they did). </p>
<p>Also, all of this ignores the fact that NOT all notes would infringe lecture copyrights, even assuming that the lecturer videotapes each lecture so as to get full copyright status (see the UT webpage above, its near the bottom). The infringement happens from copying the expressions, not the facts and ideas (i.e. saying that Motley Crue's "Kick Start my Heart" is above one of Nikki Sixx's heroin overdoes and subsequent out of body experiences isn't infringing on his copyright for the song, even though it conveys the underlying idea that dominates the song), so a creative writer with good knowledge of both the subject and copyright law could probably take notes to avoid any potential copyright violations.</p>
<p>Basically, without VERY tricky legal wording by both universities and professors, there is little to no real way for them to make any punishment stick for note sharing/selling violations. Assuming they follow their own regulations, they COULD NOT suspend/expel/etc. a student for something like this. Further, the risk of an infrignement lawsuit is low at best. The only people at risk for commercially taking notes would be nonenrolled professional note-takers, who may or may not be guilty of trespass - but it would be near impossible to actually get them for that; in a large lecture class of 50+ students (these are the only classes that have commercial note taking, as far as I'm aware), a professor is unlikely to notice one student, and even if they saw them they would have to photograph them/etc. as proof of their prescense; the police are unlikely to sit in on a class just to catch one such person. In any event, misdemeanor trespass is a negligible crime and the costs of such a crime would be far outweighed by the potential benefit that one could gain from selling notes.</p>