Innovative Open Textbook Company Fights Back Against Publishers' Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
from the what-infringement? dept
Last year, we wrote about how a bunch of the largest textbook publishing firms had teamed up to sue an innovative open textbook startup called Boundless for copyright infringement. Was Boundless reproducing their books? Nope. Instead it had created alternative textbooks from various open sources -- but those texts mirrored the basic structure of other textbooks. It was this copying of "selection, structure, organization and depth of coverage... right down to duplicating Plaintiff's pagination" that the textbook publishers went after. Not the content. Yes, they're pissed off that Boundless cleverly sought to compete in the marketplace by making sure its textbooks were good competitors and easier to substitute in -- but without copying any of the actual content.It's been nearly a year, but Boundless has filed its counterclaims, denying the various charges, and insisting that its works have never infringed, that the textbook publishers are claiming copyright over "non-copyrightable material" and that even if there were infringement, they are protected by fair use. They also claim that the lawsuit is a form of copyright misuse and shows the publishers' "abuse of the copyright monopoly." Should make for an interesting case.
At the same time, Boundless is also seeking a declaratory judgment on its new offerings. Apparently, the company changed its offerings substantially over the last year, and while the case is still over what those earlier offerings looked like (which Boundless believes did not infringe), it's seeking a clear statement that its newer offerings won't get the company sued as well. Boundless' lawyer sent the publishers a letter last month, asking them to make it clear that the lawsuit was just over the older versions and that there were no issues with the new version, but the publishers have refused, saying that the results of the trial "will inform... current and future business practices." In other words, let's see what happens with this case, and then we'll decide if we can sue over more stuff.
We recently had a lively discussion in the comments on a recent post about the upcoming Supreme Court ruling in the Kirtsaeng case, which is somewhat relevant. The Kirstaeng case, of course, involves first sale rights, and whether or not you'll be able to resell what you bought legally abroad. A defender of taking away first sale rights (i.e., upholding the lower court ruling) argued that if the Supreme Court allows the first sale doctrine to apply to textbooks bought abroad, it will mean that textbook providers will jack up their prices abroad, rather than offer them cheaply, and thus poor students in third world countries will never be able to afford an education.
As we pointed out, this is hogwash and ignores that markets are dynamic. If the big expensive publishers decide to drop out of such markets, it seems pretty clear that there will be others who will quickly step in -- and innovative companies like Boundless were exactly what we were thinking about. They're not infringing on the works of the big publishers. They're providing much-needed competition against an oligopoly that has worked hard at keeping prices ridiculously high for educational resources. It's a market ripe for disruption, and it's silly (though not unexpected) that publishers are seeking to abuse copyright law to stamp out that disruption, rather than learning to innovate themselves.
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How many times I gotta tell ya: markets are NOT dynamic!
WRT Kirtsaeng: again, resellers don't have primary rights; there's no competition from the reseller until it has obtained the books; it produces nothing of its own so that's not competition, it's grifting via arbitrage.
And here, again, a company is in trouble for copying, even if only layout, when it should have created all from scratch. I think there's a reasonable basis for the suit (hedging that I rely on your outline), but I wouldn't award more than a token $1 for actually going to court with it.
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Re: How many times I gotta tell ya: markets are NOT dynamic!
OOTB is a fucking freetard and ADMITS it
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/12500917012/riaa-doesnt-apologize-year-long-blog-cen sorship-just-stands-its-claim-that-site-broke-law.shtml
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Re: Re: How many times I gotta tell ya: markets are NOT dynamic!
It's annoying when OOTB does it, and it's annoying when you do it as well, and in both cases all either of you are really doing is essentially holding up a sign with 'ignore me' written all over it.
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Re: How many times I gotta tell ya: markets are NOT dynamic!
You obviously miss the point of what Boundless was trying to do - create a replacement for obnoxiously high priced textbooks. They created their own content and kept the same structure so when an instructor said read pages 156 to 312 for next class it covered the same material. That's just competition at it's finest, pure and simple.
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Re: How many times I gotta tell ya: markets are NOT dynamic!
One again you have no idea what you are talking about.
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Re: How many times I gotta tell ya: markets are NOT dynamic!
Yes there is still a lot of dynamism left in the markets and am grateful for that. The attitude of �it moves; tax and legislate it!� will kill off many of the good ideas in favor of the one (firm, group?) writing the text of the legislation.
Legislation by itself is not always bad but legislation written by and for a monopoly is.
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Re: Re: How many times I gotta tell ya: markets are NOT dynamic!
protect them at all costs ! ! !
konsumer scum ? ? ?
rape them again ! ! !
there, that about sums up our current situation to date...
questions ? ? ?
(remember: power NEVER devolves voluntarily...)
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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Re: How many times I gotta tell ya: markets are NOT dynamic!
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Re:
Maybe. Maybe not. As lawyers repeatedly tell clients, "It depends..."
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Seems to be what they are doing in some sense. So these textbook publishers claims are pretty fucking baseless, even under extreme interpretations of copyright law.
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I'll readily admit Wikipedia helped me through college more than my textbooks ever have. There are definitely some good textbooks out there, but a lot of them are garbage too. Step up your game assholes.
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If you're depending on Wikipedia for accuracy, I'm suprised you managed to graduate.
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at last
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This has been going on for decades. Where have these competitors been all of these years. Anyone know what the market size is for Western medical school anatomy texts in Thailand? Why haven't new competitors gained any real foothold in the comparatively vast US market? Can a start-up make it in foreign markets alone? I'm not at all convinced.
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I also couldn't tell from the website how they make money. It invites you to sign up from a free text (I didn't) but couldn't tell if everything was free or if that was a teaser.
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Given the site's description of how alternative materials are prepared, unless I am missing something it seems to me that the site needs to secure a copy of a publisher's textbook, digitize same, mimic its arrangement of chapters and topics, and then copy material from the internet to fill-in each chapter and topics. Moreover, if a reading assignment from a "regular" textbook is given, the pages in the regular textbook are sent to the site, whereupon the counterpart subject matter in the alternative textbook is identified for study.
Obviously, many details remain to be fleshed out, but at first glance is does seem that the site is at legal risk for any number of actions, including, inter alia, digitizing the entirety of the original textbook, incorporating the structure of the original textbook into the alternative, and distributing the alternative to students. Each of these clearly cut against the grain of Fair Use, which leaves me wondering how likely is it that its original offerings will be found non-infringing (an uphill battle for sure) and how its newer offerings are purportedly able to avoid infringement given the site's stated method for crafting alternatives.
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wording doesn't have to come into it
I'd also question whether their version has been effectively peer reviewed in order to officially be a textbook.
Good luck to them though. The mark up on text books possible due to the obligated market is appalling.
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Re: wording doesn't have to come into it
If the content of the more expensive book is so much better than the open source one then it has nothing to fear. However we know that the pricing for those textbooks is sheer insanity and people will surely flock to the open source one despite any limitations.
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It was never intended to allow perpetual education monopolies that are refreashed every time the expiry date comes round.
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Books (and knowledge in general) need to be more portable than a wifi connection allows and more durable than some temporary website or firm. Wikipedia is less than 10GB and many schools install a local server for it. I would expect a local copy of any such text used in a college or otherwise course.
It looks as though they did not copy anything and are being sued for semantics. It seems they wrote and created their own work with no copying at all. (semantics as in substituting in different words yet still getting the same, for better or worse, intellectual argument)
The Plaintiff's claim of "selection, structure, organization and depth of coverage... right down to duplicating Plaintiff's pagination" sounds so vague and airless it escapes me.
No matter how you toss it up textbooks almost always look the same and develop the subject matter using the same intellectual threads. There have been no new textbook format since Newton's Principia. (and even that...) Even most e-books use the traditional textbook formats. Even the word �textbook� is enshrined as a stereotype phrase denoting a standard format. (am exaggerating for sake of argument, but in defense of that, the textbook current layout has developed so glacially slowly over the last few hundred years its comic relief)
For some group of firms to claim copyright on �textbook format� one might just as well copyright the format of binding pages together and calling this newfangled thing a 'book'. Better yet put it up on a screen and call it a web page!
It seems that copyright is mainly used to harass your competitors. Lets get rid of it.
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Suits
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