Students Find Class Notes Through Knetwit

By Broadside Correspondent Joe Beeton

Knetwit.com is the only site that makes sharing intellectual property simple, safe and profitable according to its fall 2008 press release. The idea was conceived in 2007 by Tyler Jenks and Ben Wald, two students at Babson College. They dropped out of school to start the site and create what they envision as eventually being the “world’s largest virtual study hall.”

Knetwit is a knowledge-sharing site geared toward college students that pays anyone who contributes class notes, assignments, or exams, and allows anyone to download content for free. Students—and potentially professors, or anyone else—can download the site’s thousands of files for free and are paid every time they upload notes and every time their content is downloaded.

Jenks and Wald, who have since been highlighted as two of Business Week’s 25 Best Young Entrepreneurs of 2008, felt that there was a need for a comprehensive online study resource that provides incentive for quality contributions.

“College students see social networking and online research as part of their everyday academic life,” said Wald, co-founder and president of sales and marketing for Knetwit. “As recent college students ourselves, we are familiar with the frustrations that often come with researching information online. And with Knetwit, we strive to make it easier for people to find relevant information around any topic.”

Notes are found by searching for a specific school, course, keyword or subject area.

Structured like many other Web 2.0 social-networking sites, Knetwit is free to join, it allows users to create profiles and build a “Knetwork.” It generates revenue from selling featured advertisements.

What sets Knetwit apart is that anyone who joins can potentially make money. Knetwit pays users with the site’s internal currency, Koins, which are redeemable for cash via PayPal or products featured on the site’s store. The exchange rate of Koins to cash is approximately four cents per Koin.

“The idea is that students and professors will have a new way to make a little extra money for the work they already do,” said Jenks, co-founder and president of operations. “We allow members to profit from their posted content, and at the same time others benefit from the shared knowledge.”

Unlike sites that are designed to share personal pictures and post comments, networking sites that are designed for the distribution of knowledge tread on potentially thin legal ice. Similar note-sharing sites such as A-Plus Notes and Einstein’s Notes have been hit with intellectual property theft and copyright-infringement lawsuits.
Some Mason students are cautious about using Knetwit.

“Where is the line drawn between notes gathered in class and a professor’s intellectual property? What about concepts covered in class that are copyrighted by a professor or even the university itself?” said sophomore accounting major Pratik Shah. “[Knetwit] doesn’t seem to have any method of screening the notes that are uploaded, and if they are actually paying you for uploading what could be other people’s intellectual property, they are bound to face legal issues.”

Senior art and visual technology major Michael Farnham had similar concerns. “Does [Knetwit] take responsibility for what is posted, or would I have to worry about being liable for uploading notes from class? I just don’t understand how people could legally be paid for sharing their professors’ ideas.”

Knetwit’s policy is that users will police themselves. The site refers students to the note-sharing policies of their individual school’s handbook and encourages everyone to report files that contain somebody else’s work. According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Knetwit is protected from copyright violation claims as long as it removes material notified as possibly violating copyright.

Jenks pointed out that the difference between the sites that have faced legal hassles and Knetwit is that those sites take professors’ notes, package them and sell them to students for a profit, whereas Knetwit just facilitates the sharing of notes between students.

“We have gotten a few e-mails from annoyed professors who originally thought that we were ‘selling their notes,’ where in reality we are simply allowing students to exchange their own class notes for free and [we are] paying royalties generated by revenue back to the contributors. In almost every example the professors misunderstood what we actually do,” said Jenks. “We in no way condone or support copyright violation and will do what we can to prevent it.”