BU tries to fail business selling lecture notes

The price: $5 a class, or $49 for a semester's notes.

In the first six weeks of the semester, Beantown Notes has blanketed the campus with fliers, advertised in the student newspaper, and set up Web page and a storefront a block from campus on Beacon Street. The firm says it currently offers notes from about 30 classes.

But now BU wants to shut the company down for stealing its intellectual property, saying that what Beantown Notes is doing is illegal. This week, BU general counsel Robert B. Smith sent the company a "cease and desist" letter threatening legal action.

"We are a private university, and no company has any right to sell its wares or ply its trade on our campus without our permission," Smith said in an interview. "Faculty spent countless hours developing their ideas, and to take that professor's intellectual property and try to convert it to their own use is just plain wrong."

Representatives of Beantown Notes say they aren't doing anything illegal or even anything new. Ian Herr, a consultant to Beantown Notes acting as spokesman, pointed to similar companies selling notes on other campuses, such as NittanyNotes.com at Pennsylvania State University or First Class Notes at Rutgers and San Diego State.

Herr said that the company is not violating intellectual property rights because it doesn't tape the professor, use verbatim notes, or reproduce handouts or tests.

But at the center of the question is a phenomenon that some college officials say is growing on campuses: organized efforts to skirt the line between studying and cheating. Like online term-paper mills, the company offers to perform work students are expected to do themselves, as a fundamental part of their education.

"Beantown Notes implicitly sends the message that you needn't to take your own notes," said Johnson, director of BU's core curriculum. "Part of college is training students to stretch their attention span and discern the most important points. I see a lot of students who are ill-prepared to do that."

Beantown Notes is not trying to help students too lazy to go to class or take their own notes, but "people who do go to class but want something else," Herr said. "Maybe they have a hard time following the professor, they're not a good note-taker, or they don't know which are the most important parts. Everybody falls into that category at some point."

The company generally hires students with at least a 3.5 grade point average, said Herr, who added that they have received applications from over 300 students.

"I figured I might as well make a few extra bucks" for going to history class, said a junior economics major who spoke on condition of anonymity. She said she was paid $9 for a 1 1/2-hour class.

"I figured they had the professor's permission," said the student, who quit when she learned they didn't.

While BU is not planning a major investigation, it might discipline a student turned in by his or her professor, said spokesman Colin Riley.

Smith said that a few years ago, BU encountered a similar business, which quickly disappeared under threat of lawsuit. During the dot-com craze, a variety of websites offered class notes for free. One was Versity.com, now defunct, which dropped Yale from its roster under legal threat. In 1996, the University of Florida lost a lawsuit it filed to stop a similar company, with the courts ruling that the notes belonged to the students. But Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, said that the case involved unusual circumstances that won't help Beantown Notes.

"What is taught in the classroom and accompanying material belongs to the institution and the professor," he said.

Although Beantown Notes maintains that it's in the right, Herr refused to say who started the company and why. Emanuel Goffer, who staffs the Beacon Street office, called himself the owner but referred questions to Herr, who later denied that Goffer is the owner.

According to documents filed with the secretary of state's office, Goffer is the president, treasurer, clerk, and director of Beantown Notes. He said he didn't graduate from BU, but went to another school with the same initials, and he declined to answer further questions.

Herr asserted that some professors have praised the company's notes as a study aid, but would not give names.

"What's the worst that could happen?" he asked. "Someone could actually learn something and do well on the test. Is that such a bad thing?"

Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.