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.'"

Comments

Boo hoo for the dinosaurs

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you can't copyright facts and figures only their presentation and form, as long as the arrangement, structure and alignment is different, they don't have a leg to stand on.

Re:Boo hoo for the dinosaurs

[Steve Furlong]

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.

Re:Boo hoo for the dinosaurs

[similar_name]

It doesn't matter. They don't need to win, they only need to drain resources from Boundless and scare off investors.

Re:Boo hoo for the dinosaurs

[Defenestrar]

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."

Re:Boo hoo for the dinosaurs

[thelexx]

U.S. Copyright Law

Is the Table of Contents Copyrightable?

Bernard C. Dietz, current head of the renewal section of the examining division of the U.S. Copyright Office, October 17, 1991, stated in his deposition, "...it has to be kept in mind that in the vast majority of cases the table of contents itself is not copyrightable; it's nothing more than a listing of the citations in the book. There has to be something uniquely attributable to that author of the table of contents to make it copyrightable."

From here. (Never heard of that book before. The world is bizarre.)

Re:Boo hoo for the dinosaurs

[rtb61]

A company is producing free books, they are generating no income likely running off donations. The publishers had go togethor knowing full well their case is bullshit and sharing the cost in case the company producing free books manages a legal defence.

This is a straight up corrupt abuse of the legal system. The publishers know their claim is a lie, they are simply relying of the company producing free books not having the money to pay for a legal defence and hoping against hope someone like the ACLU doesn't jump to the defence of the free book company.

The crux of the matter

[ryzvonusef]

From the Article:

To illustrate this claim of intellectual theft, the publishers’ complaint points to the Boundless versions of several textbooks, including Biology, a textbook authored by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece. The Boundless alternative, the complaint alleges, is guilty of copying the printed material’s layout and engaging in what the complaint calls “photographic paraphrasing.” In one chapter of the printed book, for instance, the editors chose to illustrate the first and second laws of thermodynamics using pictures of a bear running and a bear catching a fish in its mouth. Boundless’s substitute text uses similar pictures to illustrate the same concepts—albeit Creative Commons-licensed images hosted on Wikipedia that include links to the source material, in accordance with the terms of the open license. (The end of each Boundless section also includes links to the text’s source material, which often includes Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia of Earth, and other Web sites.)

The complaint goes on to allege that Boundless’s choice of bear photographs in that chapter reflects “only the previously made creative, scholarly, and aesthetic judgments of the authors and editors of Campbell’s Biology.”

(Bolded by me)

So... is that wrong? I don't get it. If it's Creative Commons, doesn't that allow this sort of thing, by definition?

Re:Non-literal copying: the choice of a bear

[Idarubicin]

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.