The University of Vermont is the latest in a growing list of colleges and universities that want to ban students from taking lecture notes to sell unless they have the professor’s permission.

In the practical sense, the anonymity of the paid note-takers makes this a policy that will be extremely difficult to enforce. In a larger sense, it is an important policy, a necessary stand in defense of the rightful owners of intellectual property.

College lectures do not just hatch from thin air. They are the result of research, scholarship and the ability of the lecturer to pull the material together into a coherent, even compelling, narrative. As such, they are the property of the professor who created them and of the institution that provided the circumstances for their creation. The unauthorized use of another’s property for profit — it is immaterial whether the profit is large or small — is illegal, unethical and, in the Internet world, not at all unusual.

UVM’s opponent here is GotNotes, a Burlington-based company that sells notes on-line from about 100 large lecture courses — $2.50 for a single class, $35 for the entire semester. GotNotes responded to UVM’s challenge by announcing it intends to expand its offerings by 40 courses next year and to press legal action if the school attempts to enforce the policy.

A lawsuit defending the right to thievery would be the height of frivolity were this not just the latest example of the Internet culture’s view that anything — music, movies, literature, scholarship — that can be pilfered and posted is fair game. Intellectual property is a precious and fragile commodity that increasingly is being treated like the product of a Soviet agricultural collective. As the conservative wit P.J. O’Rourke so deftly points out, there is no clearer example of the respect society has for communal property than the public restroom.

Some schools have solved the unauthorized notes-for-hire problem by offering better notes without the profit motive — the note takers, usually graduate students, are hired with the professor’s consent. Their names are known to the students who purchase this low-cost service and the subscription fees are used to fund these worthwhile work-study jobs. The spotty work of the for-profit, anonymous outfits simply cannot compete.

In this case, a fairly easy solution is at hand. In the broader sense, though, there is no more serious issue before Congress and state legislatures than the failure of current laws to quell the rampant pirating of intellectual property on the Internet and to refute the growing urban myth that the Web makes such protections as copyright and tradmark laws — and ethical conduct — obsolete. In a free-market global economy, the makers of ideas will go where their ownership rights are protected; the brain drain from jurisdictions that do not respect intellectual capital will be devastating. It is increasingly important that lawmakers, federal and state, make the right choice between the creators and the copycats.