Willful Copyright Infringement by IIT Professor
By Roman Kofman
There are many reasons you might produce sub-par work for a class: you ran out of time, it didn’t matter much to your grade, something else came up, other classes took precedence. An ideal student would do a perfect job every time, but whom among us is perfect? You put less effort into that which does not have as much impact. Now, imagine that this sub-par work is to be published online by your professor. It is indexed by Google, so that every time anybody searches for your name in conjunction with “IIT,” the work might show up. In my Computers and Society class (a required class in the Department of Computer Science), this is precisely the case.
The class is, in my opinion, essentially a Humanities class taught by a professor attached to the Computer Science Department. As one might imagine, the required quality of work is not very high. We are graded as much for turning assignments in on time as we are for fulfilling assignment specifications. Writing quality and coherence do not even impact our grades. Therefore, my submissions for the class (which have been getting perfect grades) have been far below the level of work I would associate my name with. Unfortunately, all class assignments get published on the professor’s website.
After the professor rejected my repeated requests to take my work off his website, I searched out a gem of an article published by the University Copyright Center of Ball State University. The content of this article confirmed my hope that, as a student, I reserve all rights to content that I produce for a class. With help from IIT’s Ombudsperson and some third-party involvement by IIT’s legal counsel, I am now clear on the fact that no student work can be published without explicit permission by the student. Finally, this line of pursuit resulted in all classwork submitted by myself and my peers for Computers and Society being deleted from my professor’s website.
However, several weeks later, I decided to check the website again. Several of the class’s most recent assignments are posted online, and I am at a loss as to what my next step should be. Should I serve my professor with a formal “cease and desist”? Should I go to legal counsel with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice? The DMCA notice would make IIT (as the internet service provider for the site) liable if the content was not removed. Surely, this would produce results. I doubt I would actually sue the school, but who knows? Unlike my research for my Computers and Society classwork, my research on my legal options has been thorough. Winning a case of willful copyright infringement would net me a nice payout to help me with my student loans.
