Sale of Class Notes Objectionable?

So, you are in class and take notes from the professor’s lecture. A classmate misses class and asks you to share your notes and you do. Problem? What if you posted your notes online? Or, better yet, what if you embraced our entrepreneurial spirit and posted your notes online and charged a fee for someone to review them?

Ryan Stevens, a former college student, set up a company, NoteUtopia.com, by which students would share class notes for a small fee. Apparently, the service ran into objections from the university based upon a California law (supported by college faculty) 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.”