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Major Textbook Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up
linjaaho writes "Three major textbook publishers have sued a startup company making free and open textbooks, citing 'copyright infringement,' as the company is making similar textbooks using open material. From the article: 'The publishers' complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive printed material. To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material "alignment" — a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers' copyrights.'"
they don't have a leg to stand on.
You're applying common sense, not a wise practice when it comes to law. Especially not when it comes to "law" as practiced in the modern US. If a bunch of publishers get together and lobby aggressively I wouldn't be surprised if a court found that a sufficient degree of similarity existed, thereby violating copyright. And if the court didn't find it, well, Congress can amend the copyright law and I think the US Copyright Office can regulate matters a bit.
It doesn't matter. They don't need to win, they only need to drain resources from Boundless and scare off investors.
Not necessarily, depending on implementation it could also be considered derivative work from the table of contents or structure of the original text. Remember that even paraphrasing can be copyright violation (although not always). If I take a paragraph of someone's work, reword it, and pass it off as my own (or as a public domain work), that is infringement. Also remember that style, and other artistic considerations can also be protected work. The key to this case will be in the method of "alignment."
I don't know whether this lawsuit will succeed or fail, but many open source and open materials are based on proprietary materials.
For example, much of Wikipedia is graduate students and college students taking ideas from their textbooks, compiling them and putting them into their own words.
Linux is based on a commercial operating system, and many of its best software packages are either clones of popular Windows software packages, or enhancements to academic projects (like Apache and Mozilla).
The two need each other it seems.
The point of that is that it makes sense for us to keep a profit motive for development of new proprietary materials, and over time, to migrate older knowledge to the realm of free and open learning.
I think it's time to end all this BS.
Just create an official "license to kill competition". It shall allow to just call a judge and cry "WHaaaa Mr. Judge! They are making me lose money! WHaaa" And the judge will just send the police.
Just make the license expensive enough. And then find a way of dealing with the thousands of jobless lawyers.
Not so much sue, but license. You will have to pay a "knowledge usage" fee each time you utilize your learned knowledge for monetary gain. With the correct "lobbying" this fee will be captured on your tax form and levied based on the work you do (engineer, doctor, etc) coupled with the money you earned (salary) and the cost of the education you paid to "gain" your knowledge.
If you just happen to be smart and able to have meaningful and well-paying employment, without any identifiable higher education, then you probably just stole the information and skills from someone and will be open to punishment.
The claim is that apart from the copyright in the particular photographs, the choice of a bear to illustrate the laws of thermodynamics is itself sufficiently original.
Honestly, that does sound like the (big, evil, monstrous, yadda, yadda, yadda) textbook publisher may have a point. There are some concepts in physics that are always illustrated in (nearly) the same way, with (nearly) identical examples. You can't talk about Maxwell's demon without a demon. Schrodinger will always have his half-dead cat. Every first-year dynamics textbook will have a race car travelling a banked, circular track riding on tires with a certain coefficient of friction.
On the other hand, I've spent a couple of decades studying and working in physics-related fields, and I've yet to come across a famous or canonical bear-catching-a-fish story in any branch of physics, let alone thermodynamics. The choice of a novel illustrative example certainly seems like a genuinely creative act on the part of the textbook's authors, and could form the basis of a legitimate complaint.
~Idarubicin
Which is why we need a law that requires the claimant to pay for the defense's legal costs if the case is found to be frivolous or abusive. I believe there is such a law in the UK. I shed no tears for textbook publishers getting their well deserved comeuppance.
We are all just people.