It's Against the Law For California College Students to Sell Their Notes

With one kid in a Cal State and another one heading there next year, I found this story interesting:

NoteUtopia, a startup company for college students founded by a young Sacramento State graduate, has been ordered to "cease and desist" by the CSU chancellor's office, which said the company is violating state education codes that prohibit students from selling their class notes.

The ban came just weeks after Ryan Stevens launched his company – sort of an eBay for college students to buy and sell their study materials – with back-to-school booths in September at CSU Sacramento, Chico and East Bay.

The 10-year-old law that prompted the ban is so obscure that it caught NoteUtopia's founder, campus officials and Internet law experts by surprise.

Eric Goldman, director of the High-Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University Law School and a professor of Internet law, said "many people had no idea it's on the books."

But while the law may be a sleeper, the issue of what students can do with material taken from class lectures "comes up with some regularity," Goldman noted. It's at the heart of an academic and legal debate on intellectual property rights involving how classroom content is shared among students.

I would think a legal challenge to this might be successful. Notes are not the property of the professors or college and a student should be able to share or sell them if they wish.

Next I expect the professors to push for the end of the used book market. A lot of profs pad their income by requiring books they've written to be purchased for their classes (at exorbitant prices, mind you). The used book market, and now the rental book market, saves students a ton of money and costs the profs the money they'd make on their new books.

Of course, they can get around that be creating a new revision of their books that renders the old ones useless. That's done quite a bit too.