Administrators and Faculty members questioned yesterday the use of copyrighted material on a Website that helps Harvard students choose their courses.
On the Course Decision Assistant 2.0 Website, sponsored by Digitas, a student computer organization, students can analyze different class schedules based on departments, Core requirements, course meeting times, exam groups and the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) Guide ratings.
But CUE members are concerned that the organization's use of copyrighted data for the site may be illegal or inappropriate.
According to the computer group's president, Alexander Y. Wong '98-'99, Digitas intends to help students make an informed decision about classes and did not violate any laws or University regulations by downloading CUE Guide data and reusing it.
"We feel like the CUE info is made public to all students and we didn't think there was anything wrong with using it," Wong said.
The organization did not contact CUE before posting the Course Decision Assistant site on the Web, Wong said.
Wong said that since shopping period CUE officials have contacted him about the site, but they have not told him what action the committee plans to take.
At a CUE meeting yesterday afternoon, committee members voiced concerns that the Digitas site might give individuals from outside Harvard access to privileged information.
Currently, CUE Guide reviews of courses--which are only undertak- Digitas got the CUE data it uses in its scheduling program from a now-defunct official CUE Website, run by the University's Instructional Computing Group (ICG). CUE pulled the site when it discovered that ICG had accidentally caused errors in the data when it was putting the reviews on the Web, according to Dean of Undergraduate Education David Pilbeam. At yesterday's meeting, CUE members discussed the Digitas site and its implications for the CUE Guide, which hopes to re-institute another official Website soon, under the auspices of its own computer technicians. Committee member James T.L. Grimmelmann '98, who is affiliated with Digitas, spoke in favor of updating the official CUE site to feature a similar schedule planning program. "The appropriate way to deal the the situation is to make the Digitas site obsolete," he said. While student members of the committee generally supported the purpose of the Digitas course planner, some administrators and Faculty members were uncomfortable with allowing a group outside the administration to perform what they deemed to be University functions. "Digitas was moving into an empty niche, but it's a niche that should be properly filled by plodding Faculty decisions," Pilbeam said. The committee did not reach a decision about the situation yesterday. According to Wong, about 4,100 individual computers have accessed the Digitas site between Jan. 19 and yesterday. Because the University limits access to CUE information to computers with harvard.edu addresses, Wong said Digitas used the same criteria in determining who could see the reviews on their site. He said that more than 10,000 course searches have been performed on the Course Decision Assistant program to date. Because Digitas downloaded much of the CUE data, Wong said, the site still allows students to plan their schedules even though the CUE site is no longer accessible on the Web. However, links to the original CUE reviews on the ICG server no longer work. CUE members also noted that the Digitas site includes links to The Crimson's Confidential Guide to Courses, which is also on-line. According to Justin S. Funches '99, manager of information services for The Crimson, Digitas did not ask The Crimson's permission before touting the site as a joint venture of Digitas, The Crimson and the CUE Guide. "We had absolutely nothing to do with [the Digitas site]," Funches said. "In the spirit of doing what's right, this is wrong.
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