Do professors have copyright in their lectures?

Posted by Keeley Vega at 7:15 am under Copyright, Litigation.

A textbook publisher, Faulkner Press, sued Class Notes (dba Einstein’s Notes), a student note-taking service at the University of Florida, for copyright infringement.

Faulkner sells textbooks and CDs used to submit assignments and quizzes. These materials are required for the courses in which they are available. Class Notes hires students to take notes during lectures and then sells those notes for profit.

According to various news reports (I don’t have access to the complaint yet), Faulkner alleges that class notes violates copyright laws by publishing and selling lecture notes and reprinting test questions from a Faulkner Press textbook. Note: it’s not clear to me whether these questions were discussed in class, transcribed, and then published or if they were copied directly from the textbook.

UF sued A-Plus Notes in a similar suit in 1996, but the Court of Appeals held that students’ notes are not the intellectual property of the professor. For some reason, Faulkner believes this case is different.

The great thing about this case is that it has inspired Wikinomics-like reactions from the students: there is now a Facebook page dedicated to the suit called “Boycott Faulkner Press (Save Einstein’s Notes).”

More from the Independent Florida Alligator.

And here’s an editorial cartoon that sums up the suit quite perfectly: