Comment by St-Clock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by St-Clock | Hacker News Reader

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I am STRONGLY against this kind of service and I hope you will consider removing any recording that was not approved by the lecturer.

Otherwise, I want a recording of everything you have said while working. Actually, I want a recording of everything everybody said while they were working so my BigBrother TM audio processing technology can highlight anything that was out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever.

I hope you understand that most lecturers/profs/researchers/people aren't concerned about their copyrights. They are concerned about their reputation and about what ill intentioned school administrators, students or politicians could do with these recordings. You just need one bad case of misuse of these recordings before some universities or unions sue the hell out of you.

I share your goal: education is good and the more people learn, the better the world will become. But if you start recording everything I say in my lectures, I promise you that they will be way more boring.

Are there any known instances of a lecture recording being used against an instructor unfairly?

I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way. In any case, there are better ways to be interesting and entertaining [1].

I think everyone understand that instructors aren't concerned about copyrights. They're concerned about having to improve the quality of their lectures, or have a permanent record of lectures they're not really proud of.

[1] Richard Buckland, UNSW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bLCjMA0YlE

"I think everyone understand that instructors aren't concerned about copyrights."

Well if you click on the "about" link on lectureleaks.com, you'll see that they only talk about copyrights. They do not seem to care about anything else... Incidentally, they have quite a lengthy copyright and license notice themselves... Maybe I should write one for my course.

"Are there any known instances of a lecture recording being used against an instructor unfairly?"

If you asked me whether instructors were sometimes treated unfairly by students, administrators or politicians, I would say yes. Having access to recorded lectures just adds a new angle of attack.

"I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way."

I was actually referring to some ill intentioned people who would turn a joke, a simple mistake you made, or a controversial topic you taught against you. For example, teaching evolution is a risky business in some US states.

Could the lectures be anonymized? remove the school affiliation or even auto-tune to avoid voice recognition. Would that be acceptable?

But people don't want anonymized recordings, they want to know that they are listening to a recording of a psychology lecture at Harvard, not a generic psychology lecture. If you anonymizing a Harvard lecture, someone else will go "There's no harvard lecture on this site, I'll record my own one and upload it"

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