ON 16 January 2006, Miriam Naor of the Israel Supreme Court upheld a decision of Tel Aviv District Court Judge Isiah Shinler, banning the sale of “Torts in the Light of Court Rulings” allegedly authored by Eithan Inbar. Plaintiff Dr. Asaf Yaacov, a lecturer at the Law School of the Herzlia Interdisciplinary Center claimed that Inbar essentially transcribed and published his lectures.
Back when I studied engineering in Britain, in the early nineties, we occasionally bunked lectures and photocopied each others notes. Over the past decade, with the escalation of mobile computers and Internet access, manual note taking is almost a thing of the past.
I am now in my final year of a law degree, and, although I religiously attend lectures, I never bother to take notes. Why? Well one of my fellow students runs a stenography business, and she types up every word into her laptop. At the end of the lecture, I simply plug in a disk-on-key and download her summary. Another student used to publish his notes on his website, but now simply distributes them to a mailing list, and lecture summaries from previous years are available, either on the website maintained by the Student Union or from similar private ventures.
I always found some of the lecture notes circulating around the class amusing, in that law students who should have known better, often write copyright notices on every page of their summaries. Now perhaps, they’ll be a little more modest about the nature of their contribution.
