Sharing Your Notes Online—and Getting Paid for It

Knetwit is a Web site that combines some familiar Web 2.0 features — user profiles, file sharing, online communities — with the goals of campus note-taking services. Its creators, who dropped out of Babson College to launch the service, have ambitions to develop it into a one-stop destination for educational content not only for students, but for professors and researchers as well.

As is often the case with new sites that rely on user-supplied content—and especially those that direct advertising revenue to members based on the popularity of that content—the model could raise some thorny legal questions, such as ones that continue to dog paper-based note-taking services, namely: At what point do class notes become indistinguishable from lecturers’ intellectual property? And how much legal responsibility does the site bear for the contributions of its members?

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