Legal Research

We've blogged before about provisions in the California Education Code that make it illegal to sell term papers in California.  Now a new service, NoteUtopia, that allows students to buy or sell class notes online is coming under fire from California State University.  The Sacramento Bee reports that the CSU Chancellor's Office has issued a "cease and desist" order to NoteUtopia, which alleges that the company is violating California Education Code 66450.  This statute states that:

no business, agency, or person, including, but not necessarily limited to, an enrolled student, shall prepare, cause to be prepared, give, sell, transfer, or otherwise distribute or publish, for any commercial purpose, any contemporaneous recording of an academic presentation in a classroom or equivalent site of instruction by an instructor of record. This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium, including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten class notes.

The Sacramento Bee reports that CSU's vice president for student affairs followed up with an email to students warning that students who buy or sell notes risk disciplinary action, which could include expulsion from CSU.  NoteUtopia has called Education Code 66450 "obscure," but a natural language search query in Westlaw's CA-ST-ANN source,  "is selling class notes prohibited," turned up the statute in the first 20 search results.  Some scholars have indicated that NoteUtopia may be able to launch a First Amendment challenge to the statute.  It will be interesting to see whether NoteUtopia moves forward with a legal challenge or decides to concentrate on some of the other services that its site offers.