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Don't Take Notes In the Bookstore
mikesd81 writes "The Harvard Crimson reports that the Harvard Coop asked Jarret A. Zafran to leave the store after writing down the prices of six books required for a junior Social Studies tutorial. The apparent new policy could be a response to Crimsonreading.org, an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers. The Coop claims the ISBN identification numbers in books are their intellectual property. Crimson Reading disagrees. 'We don't think the Coop owns copyright on this information that should be available to students,' said Tom D. Hadfield, co-creator of the site. The student paper reports that an unnamed intellectual property lawyer agreed with Crimson Reading's position."
an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers
So Harvard Coop is excluded from the list, and I doubt students will be rushing there in a hurry.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Trying to win an argument with a Harvard (sucks) student is like licking your elbow.
Back at Princeton, I spent my entire Freshman allowance (yes, sorry, my folks did give me a Freshman bonus or something...) on just books, so it makes me happy to see this sort of thing going on. I wish I had had the internet like these Harvard (sucks) kids.
So, now book sellers don't want you to do price comparisons? College textbooks are so ridiculously overpriced, its a tragedy. I've been lecturing at a community college for over three years now. One class I do is a non-credit pre-Chemistry class. Because its a prereq for General Chem. 1 and 2, we use the first three chapters of the textbook for that course. The $180 textbook. Many of my students aren't even planning on taking General Chem at my school or at all. But, if they want to be able to keep up with the homework, they have to get the book.
And its the same for all my classes. Books are $100 to $200 new, the bookstores almost never have used books, and if they do you know they bought them back from the previous owner for pennies on the dollar. I start each of my classes every semester by showing the students the "required text" and then explaining how they can get by with an older edition or with some internet research.
Lately students have been finding the wholesale-priced "international editions" online which saves them money without sacrificing quality. But, where do schools and publishers think students are getting all this money from?
I agree with RMS on the topic of the term "Intellectual Property".
It's a FUD term that opportunistic lawyers and unscrupulous corporations (the embarrassingly pathetic SCO) use to justify empty threats and pump-and-dump litigation.
Patents, copyrights, and trademarks mean something. "Intellectual Property" is the high-ranking corporate imbecile's buzz word of the year.
The book store has as little "ownership" of the ISBN as they do of the title of the book itself.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I don't really understand what this is all about.
I mean, if you have to get the textbooks, they'll have to tell you which ones to get. This means that they are either going to tell you Author/Title/Edition or the ISBN. If you have either of these you can easily look up the other on the internet. And the *prices* can't possibly be protected by copyright.
Moreover, I find it completely normal and sensible to write down the prices of what you are going to get. Maybe you want to pay in cash and have to know how much you have to bring. I mean, what would you do if you walked into a shop, wrote down a price and someone told you that you're not allowed to do that?
I don't know what is going to happen if they are really going to enforce their totally ridiculous "no note taking in a book shop" policy, but I know what *I* would do in a similar situation:
1. Look up the ISBN on the internet
2. Find out where the book is cheapest, maybe both online and offline - they'd obviously out of that because 'note taking' is not allowed
3. Get the book there
4. Only get those books at the Coop which aren't sold anywhere else. Which I doubt are many.
Does this mean they owe the coop royalties on if they let other bookstores use the same ISBN numbers?
The intellectual property argument was just an idiotic thing for them to go public with. But, the way I understand it, a store has the right to toss you out for any reason they see fit (presumably barring race or gender.) Thats why they have those "We reserve the right to toss you out on your ass" signs. When I was an annoying little adolescent, some shopkeepers told my friends and I to get out as soon as we came into their store. It was evident that we were just bored and fucking around, not intending to purchase anything. It was evident in this case that the guy was wandering around the store taking notes not only intending not to buy anything but enhancing his ability to shop competitively. If he shared his information he would be broadening that result. The store had no good reason not to toss him out.
Doesn't make it any less annoying though. used to piss me off then, pisses me off now. Especially since he was just trying to get around the unabashed robbery perpetrated by college bookstores and textbook companies.
ISBNs might be the publisher's IP (although they actually aren't), but they certainly aren't the STORE's.
In any case, the excerpt of the publisher's putative IP that is represented by an ISBN unquestionably comes under the "fair use" defense. First of all, it is a negligibly-sized component of the book, and more importantly, it is clearly being used for purposes of reviewing the book (i.e., expressing an opinion about the relationship of the book's content to its price).
It's also absurd for a store to eject people doing competitive research. To be sure, some businesses explicitly forbid picture-taking (on the argument that their "trade dress", as represented by the store's design overall, is protected intellectual property)--but preventing people recording prices and descriptions seems like it would fall afoul of various consumer protection laws, even if the restriction were explicitly posted and uniformly enforced (which it apparently is not).
Harvard "Co-Operative Society", we hardly knew ye. Next time, take a voice recorded and a concealed mic. That's faster than taking notes, anyway.
This has come up before and I believe a judge ruled that prices are facts, and facts cannot be copyrighted. That applies to the ISBN number as well.
Although that doesn't mean you cannot be asked to leave the store for doing it. It's their store and they can throw you out for anything they want. And the store is perfectly allowed to suffer for it.
I suppose you're one of those "It doesn't matter until it happens to me" folks.
You know all those problems in the world? They're your fault. After all, maleficent people are a small minority; the only reason malignant evils persist are because of the indifference of the rest.
Too harsh? Maybe, but people like you really tick me off.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
As we all known, college textbooks have been corrupt for a long, long time. It actually makes me think that we ought to move to a "pharmacy" model, where the book stores must be independent from the colleges, just as the dispensing of drugs is separate from the prescribing doctor to prevent this kind of corruption.
Of course, you couldn't do anything about private universities, but the government could implement this for public universities, and hopefully shame the private ones into going along.
If Harvard is going to these extremes such as this to prevent people from copying down a few numbers in the bookstore, you know they're corrupt to the core. Clearly they've long abandonded their mission of being a place of higher learning. Of course, the whole Ivy League's been running on reputation for a long time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Rhetorical subtlety must be lost on you. The sentence immediately following the "your fault" sentence adequately establishes the context for those who bother to read; i.e. the large class of people (of whom the GP is assumed to be a member, due to his comment) who sit by and do nothing while bad things happen to others are to blame for the endemic perpetuity of human-generated evil. Without their obsequious and/or cynical lack of action, people bent on doing harm would be comparatively powerless and/or ineffectual.
But I suppose some folks need the dots connected for them.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Of course the Coop was just making up something off the top of their head when they used the "ISBN number" pretext.
I really would be curious to hear a serious legal analysis by someone who knows, though.
My completely naive notion would be that you're on the retailer's property, and it's not totally obvious what things you're doing by right and what things you're doing by custom and by permission. Certainly you can't steal a book. Certainly you can't damage a book e.g. by tearing a page out of it.
Certainly you can open a book and flip through it even though the cumulative effect of dozens of shoppers doing this eventually causes the book to become shopworn. But is this actually by right, or is this just by custom? Quite possibly it merely a courtesy extended to me by the store.
Price information and easy price comparison help the consumer. Denying this information helps the retailer. How far does the law go in requiring the retailer to make things easy for consumers? There are such things as hired comparison-shoppers who are working for the competition. They are not bona fide customers and are not going to buy the items they are looking at. Is a store required to be nice to them?
Gas stations have such big conspicuous outdoor price signs that it must be required by law, but is that state or federal law?
In Massachusetts, shelf labels in supermarkets and drugstores are required to show a computed unit price (which is oddly useless because of creative variation in the unit used, but never mind). Until very recently Massachusetts required individual price labels on every item (but caved to years of open defiance Wal*Mart and other national chains). So Massachusetts has a certain amount of law that sorta-kinda says the consumer has some legal rights to easy price-shopping.
The Coop and the college bookstores of the world have a pretty tight lock on textbook shopping. It's not absolute, but it's certainly not a frictionless free market and every college town I've ever been in has had one very clearly dominant bookstore, and, usually, one also-ran which has some of the books you need, just coincidentally at the exact same prices as the dominant store.
Completely tangential footnote: one of my proud moments as a dad occurred in the nineties, in the days when I was still using dialup and most people didn't know what "dot-com" meant, and my kid was in college, and called me, distraught because the college bookstore was out of a textbook she needed for a course, and was estimating six weeks for restocking. I logged into Amazon--quite possibly using lynx as my browser--saw they had it, smiled my big Daddy grin and (mentally) pulled out my big Daddy wallet and had them overnight it to her. In this case, of course, I was paying more than the bookstore price (but the overnight shipping was, of course, only a fraction of the book's cost).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
And this is wrong how?
The store owners are not entitled to my money; if they decide not to offer what I want at the prices I want, it's their business decision. If this business decision drives them out of business, so be it.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
None of the universities or colleges that I've been to have a coop for books. Most of the times its places that are making income gouging the students with outrageous prices.
The bookstore at the college I presently go to will on their own initiative shrink wrap together all the materials for a class, then charge a 10% premium on their already overpriced price. And that is with the instructor not asking for the service.
Typically the prices will be marked up by 20-30% or so from what other retailers are selling them for. My book this quarter for my class was 35 at the store, but only 23 from Amazon, and about the same at several other places.
So of course I can understand if a campus bookstore would want to abuse the copyright measures to make it harder for students to shop elsewhere, if you can't compete on price or service, just paralyze the competition by limiting the ability to shop elsewhere.
Sure, the student went to the book store to find out what the ISBN's were. I have had to do this often, as the instructor was too lazy to include the ISBN or enough info to be certain of the ISBN within the syllabus. I was even referred to the campus book store without getting so much as a book title. Then I was presented with a basket of books to purchase based on the class that I was taking.
Obvious collusion between the faculty and the bookstore to drive revenue. Rather than fall prey to such a scheme I took digital photographs of the books in question and proceeded directly to amazon and some other academic book site to purchase my texts. In one case I had to resort to being behind an edition, which didn't hurt much, it was an art history text, rather than pay the exorbitant prices that were being asked at the campus store.
So, as adept as you were at potentially skewering the GP's argument... you ignore the potential reality of the situation. The schools are trying to drive revenue by creating an artificial monopoly.
The answer is no, and the parent poster is a fucking retard. The ISBN is a "fact," e.g. not copyrightable, not IP. You can list them all you want.
well, at least he wasn't tasered.
The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now music downloaders were tasered, arrested and condemned a-la Judge Dredd.
A couple of years ago I was only angry at the U.S. Now I'm all freaked out.
This story has way more to do with basic competition than with copyright. Stores often ask people to leave when they're taking notes on prices. It's not illegal or unethical for them to do so. It's a basic competition thing.
The reason they do this doesn't usually have anything to do with student databases, but the fact that competing companies will often send folks in to take notes so they can beat prices for items that consumers are especially sensitive to.
Think Wal-Mart. They didn't just magically know what the mom and pop shops were charging for goods when they went to undercut them. They sent folks in to find out which prices they had to beat. Then they beat them. It shouldn't be surprising that these same mom and pop shops would ask someone writing their prices down to vacate the store.
Empathy is the key. That was my whole point; empathy is the ability to care about others and their plights because of the unique and under-used human ability to simulate what it might feel like to be the person that is suffering. People lacking empathy don't care, and so don't act to minimize the suffering of others, saying it is not their business or it doesn't affect them, among the more popular rationalizations.
And, by-the-by, while much of morality is up for grabs, much of it isn't. One can recognize the gray areas of ethical discourse without becoming a frothy-mouthed relativist. One might especially argue over how best to help; sometimes, as many Libertarians tirelessly point out, hand-outs and unvarnished charity is often not the best approach. There is a wide gulf, however, between not knowing what to do and not caring. It is, I think, relatively uncontroversial that helping the Kitty Genoveses of the world would be a good thing, and the hesitancy of people to do so is what allows tragedies like that to occur. And while most examples of injustice or needless suffering do not rise to the level of murder, that doesn't make them unimportant or less worthy of attention.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Free market's are the most efficient, but to be so there has to be equal information for all participants. I dont see how you could stop competitor's sounding each other out, even if you think that's a good thing.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
Since when were market prices for textbooks NOT outrageous?
"if you can't compete on price or service, just paralyze the competition by limiting the ability to shop elsewhere."
Good idea, in principle, but I don't think it would work in this case. Frankly, I think this is an idiotic decision by the book store, and here's why: When I was an undergraduate, I would go to the bookstore at the beginning of the term to write down the prices of the books that I needed for my classes, so that I could compare them to prices that I could find online. Sometimes the price difference would be negligible (or the bookstore price might actually be cheaper--it was rare, but it happened), in which case I would go back and buy those books from the bookstore. However, most of the time I could find better prices online (even including shipping). So, what would I have done had they kicked me out for writing down prices? I would have assumed (quite reasonably, given the tendencies) that I could find better prices online for *all* of my books and thus just not bought any of them at the bookstore. At least if the store allows me to comparison shop, they have a chance at getting my business--if they won't let me compare prices, I'll just assume that it's because their prices aren't the lowest and buy all of my books elsewhere.