Discussion on question by Tyler: Is it appropriate for a professor to require students to sign a non-disclosure agreement before being taught?

Feeds

13:45

Q: Is it appropriate for a professor to require students to sign a non-disclosure agreement before being taught?

There's a professor at my school that claims to be writing a book. He is requiring students to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before certain lectures because he wants to maintain certain ideas of teaching his content part of his intellectual property. I think that part is reasonable (to a...

O. R. Mapper

"Thus if a student does not wish to sign, they end up missing out on lectures that they have already paid the university to receive" - arguably, if they do sign, the result is the same. They attend the lectures, but they are entirely banned from using what they learn there, thus making it as if they had never heard the respective lectures, right?

user2768

This could make for an excellent exam: The answer is protected by NDA.

Michael

I attended a digital design course where we had to sign NDAs for the tool we used. If you didn’t sign you couldn’t use the tool and couldn’t finish the course.

Federico Poloni

@Michael This raises a different, also interesting, question. Let's say I am teaching a course using Matlab, and I am using Matlab for the exam, too. What if a student refuses to accept Matlab's license? This practice is a lot more common than an NDA, but legally the two things are not too different.

Jeffrey

One thing to keep in mind is that no court (well, at least NA and Europe) would uphold this NDA. You might not want to be the one testing it, though

alephzero

13:45

I would guess that the prof is getting confused between intellectual property rights and copyright. It is entirely reasonable for the prof to require the students not to disclose the existence of the book itself before it has been published. Attempting to make them keep the contents of the course they have been taught secret is of course nonsense. Making copies of pages from the book publicly available is of course already a violation of copyright law, without any NDA being required.

Henrik Erlandsson

Interesting. I had no idea students had so little power in other countries. Here, if a professor is out of line or just deemed not teaching the course material competently, students bring it up and faculty addresses it. There's no similar mechanism at your school?

Dúthomhas

@alephzero You should make that an answer. Prof wants to protect his nascent book (and future income), but it is already protected by copyright law. Even Pearson may think twice about straight up plagiarizing his book/lecture notes -- there is a deeper legal question buried in this somewhere. But prof is already contractually bound to teach the course material.

sds

The limitations on teaching in the Hippocratic Oath can be viewed as a form of an NDA ;-)

A Simple Algorithm

@alephzero An NDA can cover copyrighted material. It's just an agreement to keep something confidential. For example the prof may think copyright protection is too limited due to fair use exceptions in the US.

Barmar

Assuming the book eventually gets published, it seems like the NDA would become irrelevent when that happens. So is it really just an agreement not to disclose before publication? That doesn't seem quite as onerous.

jamesqf

13:45

@Federico Poloni: You could always use Octave :-)

Dancrumb

The answers cover the lunacy of this approach well, but what's most baffling to me is that that prof should either be teaching prior art which can't be protected by an NDA or is teaching novel ideas, which shouldn't be "taught", especially at an undergraduate level, without peer review.

R..

@FedericoPoloni: Nobody has to "sign Matlab's license" to use it. There might be some idiotic toothless click-through, but legally it's nonsense.

PhD

I’d bring this to the Department Chair’s attention, preferably anonymously if possible. And also of the school admin. Lectures are NOT protected by NDA.

cdlvcdlv

@Dancrumb You nailed it.

Dmitry Grigoryev

@FedericoPoloni AFAIK classroom licenses don't have to be accepted by every student using the computer to be valid. They are accepted once by the person who sets it up.

cdlvcdlv

13:45

I suppose any in-class discussion about that material falls under the NDA too, making the prof the effective owner of any idea that comes up there. I mean, who's protecting the intellectual property of the students? Free & secret ideas and reviews?

5 hours later…