Get ready, class, the topic of today's lecture is plagiarism.

Don't take credit for work that isn't your own.

For that matter don't get paid for work that isn't your own.

Students who sell their notes taken in class to online or local notes companies are committing plagiarism. Sure, you aren’t passing the work off as your own, as the class the notes were taken from is properly listed, but you are being paid for the recopying of someone else's work.

Yes, this work includes the distillation of a large amount of information. Yes, it's difficult to get up at 6 a.m. to go to that lecture and summon up the energy required to form coherent notes. Yes, it costs you in notebooks, pens and hand strength.

But that doesn't mean you deserve to be paid for it.

Professors are hired for, among other things, assembling the lectures you take notes on. It's their job. Professors have a right to their knowledge as intellectual property; as intellectual property, unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Purdue policy protects lecture notes in this way as similar policies do in other universities across the country.

Your job as a student is to go to class and pay attention. You're rewarded for your presence with a grade and a step closer to a degree. When you don't go to class and let others take notes for you, or purchase them from other source, you aren't doing your job.

So why should you get paid? You aren't even guaranteed that the notes you get will pay off at all. Go to class; take your own notes — it's cheaper that way.

You are authorized as a student to your own interpretation of the lecture in your notes. You aren't authorized to sell these notes for your own profit.

Some professors choose to have their lecture notes be sold through other locations. In this case, they've given their permission for their ideas to be shared that way, just as if they've chosen to have their notes posted on a Web site. For doing the work, it's their right to choose how it gets to their students.

That's all. Hope you've been taking notes.

And that you don't sell those notes for your own profit.

n Editorial Board: Keith Thomas, Tom McHenry, Melissa Davis and Laura Pelner.