Back in the day, my profs all had a no-record policy. I worked part-time with blind students, and they were always granted an exception, because that was their way of taking notes, but anyone else? No.
But I just assumed in this day and age it would be easier to record surreptitiously, what with all the different devices out there now.
California finds it just fine to ignore federal law when it suits the state. I have no issue with students ignoring this law if it suits them.
It should. If people were intellectually consistent.
I laid out the relevant factors in the post you quoted. The short answer is: I dunno.
If you wanted to record a short segment of the presentation so you could run it through autotune, cut out words here and there so that the politician was singing “Anaconda,” then yes, for the reasons I mentioned.
If you wanted to record the entire presentation, create a DVD, and sell it shrink-wrapped on Ebay and Amazon, then no, for the reasons I mentioned.
So you see that the answer depends upon the use intended, as analyzed by the factors I mentioned in the post you quoited.
Speaking as an educator who has taught college classes, I think that this law is a bad idea. Even aside from the question of catching inappropriate behavior, I think that students recording their professors’ lectures adds more value to the educational process than it detracts, and so should not be actively discouraged. I do not consider the intellectual property argument to be significant, because any worthwhile lecture given in the classroom should be highly interactive, and thus a recording of it does little to diminish the value of being present for it: If, for some reason, a lecture cannot be interactive, the professor should be recording it in the first place and distributing the recording to the students himself. At most, I could see a requirement that any recording done not be surreptitious, so as to protect students who might say unwise things if they did not know they were being recorded.
Now, that said, the law is the law, and the student in this case clearly violated it. But the only penalty listed in the law for this act is that the student be subjected to the school’s disciplinary process, which probably has a great deal of latitude. That latitude should be exercised here to take minimal action against the student.
Meanwhile, action of some sort should also be taken against the teacher. It’s unethical and inappropriate for a teacher to be injecting their own personal politics into the classroom to that degree.
Well, my first question would be, did those federal court rulings say that videotaping of public officials is OK under ALL circumstances? That is, am i allowed to take a recording device into a police station, or any public building, or into the office of a public employee while he or she is engaged in work that would not normally be open to public scrutiny?
I admit to not knowing the full scope of these rulings, but my own position on recording the police is that they should have no expectation of privacy when they are on a public street undertaking their public job as a member of law enforcement. I do not believe, for example, that it would be reasonable to argue that i have a right to walk into the police precinct in the morning in order to record the daily briefing that the Sargent gives to the police before they go out on the streets. I do not believe i should be allowed to record the discussions made by detectives who are conversing in private about the evidence in a homicide investigation.
And if we apply similar reasoning here, the question then becomes the one i addressed in my first post: whether we should consider the classroom a public or a private space, for the purposes of these sorts of questions. As i’ve already noted, it has some of the characteristics of both. That’s why my own thinking on the matter is that the law requiring consent for recording is a good one, but that it should be accompanied by a law (or, maybe, an institutional requirement) that teachers will allow recording except in cases where they can articulate a specific and compelling reason where recording would be inappropriate. And i also believe it could be accompanied by a law or rule that requires any recordings to be for the personal educational use of the students in the class, and prohibits dissemination, and maybe even requires deletion of the recording at once the class has been completed.
I would not need to give her permission.
If a student has a valid disease or disability that requires them to record the lectures, she would visit our campus’s Disabled Student Services office. That office would contact me and inform me that the student has a DSS authorization to record my lectures, and that this is part of our university’s efforts to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I had one such student in my class recently. She is in a motorized wheelchair, and cannot write or type quickly enough to take notes in class. The DSS allocates (and compensates) another student in the class to take notes for her, and she was also allowed to record the lectures.
And the relevant section of the California law prohibiting recordings (78907) explicitly carves out an exception for students with disabilities.
I stopped paying attention to the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits over filesharing some time back, but some of these issues were frequently discussed five or ten years ago when people were being pursued for various types of copyright infringement.
One of the arguments made by some of the industry lawyers at the time was that, if you buy a CD or some other form of music, you do not have the right even to make a backup copy for your own use. They argued, on a few occasions, that this was a violation of copyright, and that factor #3 (the amount and substantiality factor) made it impermissible under fair use to copy a whole CD, even if you were doing so with a disc you had purchased yourself, and only for the purpose of backup or format shifting for your personal use.
Admittedly, they were somewhat inconsistent about this. When people cried foul, and when some regulators expressed concern at this very narrow reading of fair use, they backed off a bit, but i don’t think (and people can correct me if i’m wrong), that any court has ever found such a fair use right to exist.
If i can’t buy a CD and make a copy for my own use, why should another student be allowed to record my intellectual property for his or her own use?
I’m arguing mainly as a matter of principle here. I don’t really care at all about the intellectual property issue in this discussion. My lectures to undergraduates don’t generally contain any blinding new insights that other historians are going to steal. But intellectual property law doesn’t require that something be world-changing or brilliant in order to be protected by copyright.
I’m not at all convinced that this is true. One of the best history teachers at my early nineties high school was a crazy-ass rightwinger. He made arguments about how gay people should be imprisoned and how slavery was the best thing that ever happened to black people–and he did this in Chapel Hill, a very liberal town.
Thing is, he made these shitty arguments knowing that students would object, and he argued vociferously with them in an effort to up their debate skills and civic engagement. The people I knew–including my lesbian friend who had him and wrote a paper for his class about her realization of her homosexuality–had tremendous respect for him and his pedagogical techniques.
There are inappropriate things a teacher can do: naming and shaming a student in a publication because you disagree with her policies is sufficiently shitty that it might violate professional duties. Similarly, a professor who grades students down based on insufficient adherence to ideological positions (as happened to my ex-girlfriend in her business school class with a union-busting professor) should face penalties.
But I think it’s salutary for students to engage with educated and vigorous opinion that they disagree with.
Again, not my area of law, but my understanding is that backup copies are considered fair use.
The problem is that, even if a teacher actually is fair about it and doesn’t penalize students for disagreeing with them, the students don’t necessarily know that, and so it can have a chilling effect on open discussion in the classroom.
I’m surprised that someone who is usually so precise on areas of legal interpretation would use such vague, passive-voice language as this.
Is considered fair use by whom? Has it been ruled fair use by a court? The answer to the first question depends on who you ask. The answer to the second question is “no.”
As i suggested, plenty of copyright lawyers for companies that produce intellectual property have argued, in past cases, that personal-use backups are not, in fact, allowable under the fair use provisions of Title 17.
Of course, plenty of other lawyers argue the opposite. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says:
The United States Copyright Office, on its page dealing with copyright and digital files, notes that you can make an archival copy of computer software that you own, as long as you’re the legal owner of the software, and you destroy any archival copy when you sell or transfer the software to someone else.
But they then add:
It seems to me that copying a CD to your computer’s hard drive might fall afoul of the principles outlined in that last quotation.
First, thanks for the great input, especially persons like Chronos.
Quick summary: I think a student should be able to record what happens in a classroom, and the classroom aspect aloneshould not protect the college professor. Things happen in c classroom that should NOT happen and those items need exposure. Especially if what was recorded had nothing to do with what was supposed to happen in that classroom.
Now according to the exact law, I guess ANYTHING that happens in a classroom cannot be recorded? Is this true? Are we talking lectures here? Is it just during class times? If so what was said was NOT an official part of the college curriculum. She was just blabbering. What if the professor calls a student a nigger or faggot?
To me, recording what happens in classroom just keeps the professor and anyone else - honest.
Now Chronos says if a student has an issue of something he does, then that student can take it up with his dean. Oh really? How? What proof would the student have that the teacher was an ass? Ok, lets say the dean does listen, and does call the professor in. You can bet that professor will walk in with their union lawyer and will deny everything ever happened. Nothing will happen to her. AND you know… that student WILL PAY! It’s no wonder students are afraid to speak up.
Dont believe me? This articlepoints out over 50% of students feel intimidated about speaking up. That’s why they have to resort to websites where their identity is hidden.
Or, they need proof. Like a recording.
Sidenote: I learned in college to NEVER disagree with a professor. Answer what they want to hear.
Case in point last summer at the University of Missouri where the crazy professor was fired for her bigoted taunts. But ONLY after being recorded. Without that proof would she have been fired? No. She could have said and done anything she wanted. Heck the teachers union tried desperately to protect her even though the evidence was there.
To me just because it happens in a classroom doesnt give her full protection from being recorded.
We could just do what we did in China and have informants in the classroom to make sure that every lecture passes the political litmus test.
I did not say that. I’m on the pro-recording side here.
The risk that a professor might dislike a student and act unfairly is present always. Students do a host of behaviors that could be annoying to professor (rightfully so or not) - did the student point out an error made in lecture and the prof gets pissed, is the student rude when you correct them or consistently comes in late, do they hand in work with damn ruffles on the edge of the paper etc…
An unprofessional professor can find lots of reasons, should they choose to, to be unfair. A professional who cares about their work won’t. Restricting personal opinion (including politics) won’t take that risk away. The issue is not prohibiting topic areas but ensuring that students know the grievance process, and that professors have oversight, and that an expectation of professionalism is reinforced.
In my experience this problem comes up very rarely. Professors have students they like more or less, but generally manage to be professionals about it.
If I knew, with the specificity necessary to cite cases, I would have done so. Since I was relying on a vague memory, I wrote something vague, and specifically noted that my expertise in the area was limited.
I was thinking of the Betamax decision.
Are these some cases of the state employees? Is it an american law by the provincial or the federal levels that presume it is okay to film the state employees?
In my place of work, if someone starts an unauthorized filming, no matter if the paying client or the employee, the security will take them out and take away the apparatus. Maybe they will the police.
What is being made special about the work place here?
Jesus, you started the thread. Read the goddamned law and look at what it says. It’s not written in Sanskrit, and it’s not replete with complex mathematical formulae. It’s in plain English, with a pretty clear meaning.
Just out of interest, how do you define an “official college curriculum”?
There is no such thing for most college classes, outside of the instructor’s own syllabus. One of the points of academic freedom is that my curriculum is pretty much what i say it is, as long as it reasonably conforms to the course description, and covers the broad general topics listed in the catalog, and follows the general university requirements regarding contact hours, writing components, etc., etc. An effort to constrain college instructors to your definition of an official curriculum would be stupid and counterproductive. There is no prohibition, in any reasonable college or university, on a professor addressing issues that might not be directly listed in the syllabus.
I have a curriculum. I think it’s a good one. And in our class discussions, and in my lectures, i generally try to stick to the specific historical developments that i think are important, and that are listed in my syllabus. But the process of teaching and learning needs to be flexible, and i’m often willing for the class to make digressions if i think that those digressions will contribute to better understanding or awareness of particular ideas or thought processes or social and political issues.
This doesn’t mean that anything goes, and i’ve already said multiple times that i think this teacher’s comments were inappropriate. But some people seem to have a very narrow and constrictive and anti-intellectual idea about what a university or college class should actually be doing.
You understand, i assume, that there are more than two people involved here, right?
Let’s take your ridiculous example. Say the teacher called a student a nigger or a faggot, and we didn’t have a smoking gun audio-visual recording of the event. That means that it’s just a student’s word against the teacher’s, and the teacher’s always going to win, right? Well, yes, if you have no clue about how investigations and interviews and evidence and analysis work.
On my campus, a student could submit an official grievance, and the first thing that the university would do would be to assign an investigator, generally someone from a legal/administrative office who does not represent the faculty member, and who is supposed to be a finder of fact. That person, in the course of his or her investigation, would gather evidence. And here’s where your scenario becomes more complicated, because even in the absence of a recording, there are likely to be at least a few dozen other students in the class that heard this comment. Those students would be called in, and asked what they saw and heard. And the investigator could, if the story is corroborated, make a determination in the student’s favor.
You understand, i presume, that this is how evidence also works in court cases? People provide testimony, and that testimony is weighed in order to reach an conclusion about the events in question. Thousands of people are convicted (or found not guilty) every year in cases with no video evidence.
There are also mechanisms whereby a student who files a complaint against a professor can have his or her identity kept secret from the professor in question. This would be particularly useful in an accusation about in-class comments, because a professor would then have no idea which particular student made the accusation. This happens regularly.
It’s a bit different if the accusation involves individual mistreatment. For example, if a student were to accuse me of being discriminatory towards him or her in my grading, it might be a bit more difficult to keep the student’s identity secret while conducting the investigation. But even then, not impossible. I return all papers to my students in electronic form, which means that any student making such a complaint could easily turn over all their work, including my comments and grades, to the investigating authority. The investigator could then, separately, come to me and require that i turn over copies of all the papers i graded in that particular class. They could then look at my grading patterns and assess the fairness or otherwise, without me ever knowing who made the complaint.
There are also mechanism by which a student who makes a complaint during the semester and is fearful of retribution can be removed from a class and reassigned.
There was a professor on my campus last year who was the subject of a student grievance. The professor was found, by the university, to be at fault, and the professor never knew who made the accusation, and never knew, either, exactly what the specific charges against her were, except that they were related to issues of discrimination based on sex and gender, and politics. She lost the case without ever really having the chance to confront her accuser, and had a mark placed in her record. She didn’t lose her job, because the offense was not deemed serious enough for that. The university itself, after fielding some complaints, recognized that the process itself had not been fair, and has instituted practices to ensure more equitable adjudication in these issues.
While people with no idea what they’re talking about seem to assume that the college will always back the professor, in fact the opposite is sometimes true, especially if the university feels that the professor’s actions might open the door to broader legal action. A colleague of mine, who has a law degree as well as a PhD, acts as an advocate in such cases, sometimes for faculty and sometimes for students, and this colleague has told me that, in many of these cases, the accuser seems to get more benefit of the doubt than the accused. And that’s true in student/student complaints, such as sexual assault, as well.
This, i think, becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look at all the places on the internet where conservatives wallow in their complaints about liberal academia. When you have Pollyannas and Chicken Littles running around the country claiming and warning that any disagreement with professors will get you in big trouble in college, it’s understandable that some students might worry about speaking up in class. But that doesn’t mean that their concern is always justified. I’m not arguing that intimidating teachers don’t exist, and i have run into some faculty who think that the classroom is their political bully pulpit. But it’s nowhere near as common as the folks with a persecution complex would have you believe.
Another problem with college students is that they often don’t even know what they don’t know. I’ve have seen a number of examples of students who, when they receive a mediocre grade for mediocre work, assert that it must be because the instructor didn’t agree with their opinion, or held a different political view. They often have trouble understanding that, for me and for most of my colleagues, your analysis and explanations can, in important ways, be separated from your politics.
I have had lefty students, whose politics i completely agree with, get shitty grades on their papers because their analysis and explanations suck, or because they turned what should have been an analytical paper into a political rant. I have had conservatives students, whose politics views i sometimes found obnoxious, get outstanding grades because they are good students who know how to read and analyze and argument, and answer a question using evidence.
You know my biggest enemy in the classroom? Sheer apathy. I would take a room full of committed and hardworking and engaged and thoughtful conservatives over a room full of listless and lazy liberals any day of the week. That’s why, on my own campus, which has a significant population of military veterans, some of my best students (liberal and conservative) have been former marines and other vets. They know what hard work and commitment is, they know what it means to follow instructions, and they know what it means to pay attention in class rather than dicking around on Instagram. If i could teach classes full of veterans every semester, i’d be a happy camper, even if they were all registered Republicans.
This did not happen in a classroom, so i’m not sure how it relates to this particular case. I believe that the open spaces of the campus are, and should be, considered public space, with no expectation of privacy. I’ve also argued, in other threads, that this professor was an idiot and pretty much deserved what she got.
So I’m straight on this: You think the teacher’s union should NOT expel the student, right?
This is both completely true and extremely important.
I can think of a couple of students in my classes this semester who i find pretty annoying. They talk when others are talking, to the extent that i have asked them to be quiet; they are on their phones all the time; they clearly think the class is irrelevant to them (it’s a required class for some students); and they never do the damn reading.
But when i grade those students, i take great pains to be fair to them, and to evaluate the work they produce rather than their personalities and classroom behavior. I think i’ve always been good at doing this.
By contrast, i have a student in my class that i really like. This student always does the reading, makes good contributions to class discussions, respects other students when they are speaking, and is generally a pleasure have around. This student, however, is a pretty terrible writer and is not very good at historical analysis. When i read a paper by this person, my tendency is to want to be generous with my grade because of the effort and commitment that the student makes, but i understand that i have an obligation to all my students to judge them all by the same standards. And so the grade is a D+ or a C-. That’s what it is to be professional.
Sure, but even that decision is considerably narrower than a lot of people appreciate.
The arguments, and the ruling, drew a distinction between time-shifting and library-building. The court ruled in favor of Sony because it found that, for people who could not watch the show live, the time-shifting function of the recording allowed them to watch the show in essentially the same way without denying any revenue to the content producers.
This is not the case for people who record shows in order to keep them permanently. The principle behind the Betamax decision was that you could record and watch, but should then delete. It was not a license to record anything from the television for the purpose of making a permanent or semi-permanent collection.
Another principle, implicit in the time-shifting part of the argument, is that recording allowed a person who could not otherwise watch the program to view it at a later date. It’s a bit hard to argue that this specific principle applies to a student who sits in a classroom and records the very lecture that he or she is attending at that particular moment. Why do you need to record or “time shift” if you’re right there for the live presentation?
More recent decisions, while upholding Betamax, have also recognized the important distinctions between analog recording on videotape, on the one hand, and digital recordings on computers and similar media, on the other. In the era of the videotape, the technology itself made redistributing recorded material both difficult and subject to quality degradation. That is no longer true of digital files and connected digital devices, where an almost infinite number of perfect copies can be created and shared with very little effort, thus increasing greatly the possibility that a single unauthorized recording could have very large consequences for the owner of the material.
Again, for me the IP issues are the least compelling in this whole discussion. But i’m not sure they should be dismissed completely.