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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."
Incidents like this show that change is needed in the way that we handle intellectual property.
On the one hand, we're giving monopoly profits to the entertainment industry against the public good. On the other hand, a retailer who has spent a fair amount of time and money can just have that work copied.
In some ways I feel bad for the Coop. They had to pay someone (or multiple people) money to assemble all of this data in an easy to use format. Should others simply be allowed to copy their work? If so, how is this different from me cutting and pasting Linux code into a new kernel under my own license? One can make the argument that the Linux kernel is an original, creative work and that what the bookstore has is merely an assembled set of data - in fact, I'm sure that's what that intellectual property lawyer would correctly argue in a court.
But isn't it a moral faux-pas to just steal someone's assembled set of data? It cost them money to assemble the data. Maybe you should have to do just as much work?
We really need a better system of compensating people for the work that they do when it isn't a tangible object. With a greater and greater percentage of our economic output becoming these intangible items, we desperately need a structure that would fairly compensate both parties for the work they've put in rather than the current system of unfairly helping one side or the other based on lobbyist-written laws.
AAL OVER AMeRICA Track of where = 1400 NetBSD
well, at least he wasn't tasered.
BAHAHAHAHHA! but man i've written down the books, pricing, and ISBN number every sem lol. Then i go online to buy.
Hell i've even called them up and asked for their price and ISBN LOL
Maybe it is because you go to a lowly Community College instead of a real college or university. A Community College is not a college at all, but a stupid pollitically correct term for a lowly trade school. Community Colleges/Trade Schools are the Wal-Mart of higher education. They are taking away from the real colleges and universities, that is why they don't have the money and why the USians are a lot dumber than they used to be. This alone reduces the money available to pay for Professors who have at least one Doctorates. When the students stop purchasing their supplies from the bookstore, they have even less money for the professors and even for research. Once that happens, they either have to pay less and receive less professsors and rely on adjunct faculty instead, eliminate research, or shut downl. This is similar to the Wal-Mart effect on communities.
In other words, the universities or colleges must either dumb down like the lowly trade school and ruin the world economy just as Wal-Mart has by their strong-arming communities.
If someone can't afford their supplies from the Harvard Co-op, then they need to get a job so they will have an income and use loans, or just work at a minimum wage job for the rest of his or her life.
a bolt gun works better, there's enough babies in the world already.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?