The College Freeway is ripping off University Content
I left the following comment on Christian Montoya’s post about The College Freeway, a new site which collects college-related documents, but it appears it has been deleted caught in the spam filters:
I took a look at The College Freeway and I’m not impressed. I hate to be so negative, but it seems like a less-useful Scribd ripoff designed expressly to either (a) help college students cheat on work or (b) violate the copyrights of people running the course. Scribd, like Google docs, is a generic document sharing and collaboration site, whereas TCF seems to encourage abuse.
Since there are already a few thousand documents, I can’t give numbers, but stuff in CS100 is ripped off of Charles F. Van Loan’s textbook, and the CS211 resource is stolen from a TA’s online course notes. Neither of these is public domain, or under a copyleft license.
You should take a look at TheCollegeFreeway yourself, and see if my assessment of the site is correct. To Christian’s credit, the site is nicely designed, but personally I wouldn’t want to work on a project I knew to built on a business model of theft:
To give you some examples of material that shouldn’t be copied:
- 9 chapters of Charles Van Loan’s Introduction to Computational Science and Mathematics
- 31 course problem sets and prelims for COMS381
- More prelims and problem sets from AEM 221
- The entire course materials for BIOG 110
- Lots of the professor’s ECE 303 hw solutions, which are handwritten.
On the other hand, there is some useful material there, like these class notes for ORIE 568, which falls on the legal side of the line. I usually side with pirates when it comes to electronic copying, but pirates are people stealing from the big bad record companies, who are also basically evil. The two morally negate each other. However, non profit educational organizations are not evil; their copyright materials are what they use to educate you. So, I get more irritated when they’re ripped off.
| This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is tagged with charles f van loan, charles van loan, hw solutions, google, scribd, copyleft license, university content, cs100, copyright materials, computational science, document sharing, prelims, course notes, educational organizations, ripoff, spam filters, aem, freeway, course materials, montoya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
7 Responses to “The College Freeway is ripping off University Content”
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The business model of theft often works – lol
. I think the site has potential and if you dislike it giving any press to it, weather it be good or bad, will promote it.
How do you reconcile your positions on theft of textbook material vs. downloading copyrighted music?
Personally, I spent alot of time on the college freeway and to me it seems to be a great site. It provides alot of resources from different sources, and I personally think that passing along information has anything to do with theft.
Just my opinion….
I agree that it is easier for students to steal copyrighted information because of this site. But think about it this way. College Freeway puts so much educational information in an easy-to-access form that is free to students with facebook. Students can publish work they want and thought was useful to them. Cheaters will always cheat. I think this is a great idea and has great potential.
I think the site is great! It organizes a lot of work that students create and would throw away otherwise. And that in itself is a valueable thing. Students can help other students and themselves for free…How is that not good? YouTube has good legal content and illegal content, but in total it is a good thing. There is a legal process on the site to report copyright infringing documents.
The site’s foundation is great; the purpose is to become a new document sharing server similar to JStor or lexus nexus (but with student docs), at first these document sharing sites seemed sketchy too because of how effectively it helped students but instead- educational standards increased; as will they while the TCF grows. As for cheating docs- they will be removed when discovered because the purpose of the site is for student documents to promote education, not hinder it.
I agree its a great idea, we need a free market of academic material. That aside, is there any revenue besides ads?