A new company called Academic Earth offers free online videos of lectures from some of the world’s most renowned scholars teaching at leading universities. The company has simply grabbed the videos off the universities’ own Web sites and plans to offer tools to students who want to talk about the content — along with a chance to grade the quality of the lectures.

Richard Ludlow, the company’s CEO and founder, said in an interview today that it is allowed to republish the videos because they were released by the universities under Creative Commons licenses. Those licenses allow outside entities, even for-profit ones, to reuse the materials, provided that those entities do not use the materials for commercial purposes. Mr. Ludlow says that his company will not place any advertising on Web pages that contain university videos, though he hopes to expand the site in the future to include sections where videos from other sources are shown with advertising.

“Our business model is that we’re not going to make a dime off of any of the Creative Commons materials — we’re very respectful of the licenses,” said Mr. Ludlow. “As we integrate commercial content, then on those pages we’ll be offering commercials.”

The Academic Earth site notes that it features lectures from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale Universities, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. The company has no connection to the universities, however. Mr. Ludlow does plan to meet this week with officials from MIT to talk about its plans.

How do the universities feel about the company republishing their lectures?

“I haven’t looked at his example enough to give you a definite answer,” said Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT’s Opencourseware project, which publishes free materials from the institute’s courses, including complete videos from some 30 courses. “It might be OK—as long as the use adheres to the terms and conditions on our site, we encourage the material to be redistributed for educational purposes.” He said the company was “doing the right thing” by reaching out to MIT and meeting with university officials about the company’s services.

“Our focus is on being a content distributor,” said Mr. Carson. “They’re putting interactive services around it — it could be very complementary to what we’re doing.”

Gila Reinstein, a spokesperson for Yale, said, “It’s not OK to do anything for profit with the materials.” She said that she had not heard of Academic Earth but that she would check with the university’s lawyers about the site. “If it’s nonprofit, we’re thrilled,” she said. “If it’s meant to be something else, we probably will not be happy.”

Mr. Ludlow points out that some of the colleges and universities use more open Creative Commons licenses than others. MIT and Yale allow “derivative use” of their content, meaning that the company can cut the lectures into various sections, based on topics, he said. Berkeley does not allow such derivative use, nor does Stanford for some of its courses, he added.

So far the site’s main service, other than bringing together lectures from various universities, is to let visitors rate the lectures, giving them a letter grade from A to F. When the company first posted the lectures to its site a few months ago, the grades were all set to a default of B. Some quickly moved to A-plus grades, while one Harvard lecture got an F-plus. —Jeffrey R. Young

Categories: Video, Company-Watch