Closer to Home

In my last post I described the extraordinary story of a request I received from one of my students, that I give him my blessing to appropriate some of the materials from our class and post them to a supposedly free website that might or might not compensate him for doing so. It may be that the world has changed even more than I realize, but when I was a student I would certainly not have run the risk of being expelled from the University, let alone sued or charged with a criminal offense, in return for a vague possibility of some future compensation. In fact, there is no way I would have risked angering my instructors – not all of whom were as even-tempered as I am – by asking such a question in the first place. But to me, this is only the beginning of the mystery…

Almost as puzzling, as far as I am concerned, is how does this website make any money? It is possible that they don’t actually give out any gift cards (e.g. everyone who “enters” one of their “drawings” is told that he or she didn’t win), but even if their web hosting and bandwidth are also free, how do they make any revenue on this service if the people downloading the class materials aren’t paying anything for them? It is possible to make money by hosting web ads, but people who come to your site looking for class materials for free are not likely to click on ads offering products for sale – and even less likely to make any purchase if they do. It’s also possible that there is a “premium” version of the site, offering even better stolen material (old test questions, perhaps?) in return for modest subscription fees. But this would make it much easier to catch the people running the site if you wanted to charge them with a crime – and much more likely that someone would be motivated to do that…

It is possible that the people behind this site – whoever and wherever they are – are planning to sell the materials to someone else, possibly other college instructors. A colleague of mine once told me that he had gotten a call from a professor at a university somewhere in Southeast Asia who was using his class materials to teach her school’s equivalent of his class, and who wanted to know if he would send her copies of his last few midterm exams so she could use the questions from them. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be willing to pay for my slides and materials when they could just make their own, or obtain similar resources from colleagues, departmental archives or publishers, all of whom are potentially sources of free teaching materials that do not involve copyright violations. It’s even harder to imagine when you consider that I’d probably make those materials available to anyone who asked politely…

When I was an undergraduate there was a note-taking service available on our campus that sent a professional note-taker to each class and then typed up that person’s notes and printed copies for anybody who wanted to purchase them. Ostensibly intended to give people the chance to focus on the class without needing to stop and take notes, it was more commonly used by students who were not attending the lecture on a given day to find out what had been covered. I don’t know if the professors whose classes were covered by the service were compensated or not, but they clearly knew these notes were being taken, since there was a published list of classes for which printed notes were available posted each week in the Student Union building. And I must admit that I don’t really care if my students take their own notes, copy a classmate’s notes, or purchase them from a service, so long as they actually study those notes at some point. So if the people who are running this website were to make contact with me directly about listing notes for my class, I would certainly discuss it with them…

They’d have to come up with better compensation than a vague chance in a drawing for a gift card that may or may not actually exist, however…