Major textbook publishers sue open-education textbook start-up
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 7th Apr 2012 17:52 UTC
Legal Rage-inducing and despicable. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, three major textbook publishers, Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education, are suing a small startup company that produces open and free alternative textbooks. This startup, Boundless Learning, builds textbooks using creative commons licensed and otherwise freely available material - and this poses a threat to the three large textbook publishers. So, what do you do when you feel threatened? Well, file a copyright infringement lawsuit, of course.
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RE[2]: Derivative Works
by matthekc on Sun 8th Apr 2012 16:59 UTC in reply to "RE: Derivative Works"
matthekc
Member since:
2006-10-28

This is going to be a very grey area when you do that to an entire book. Had the books been formatted differently and used different examples there would be no case. The statement I made was a comment on the legal system and what is allowed. I think this work will be lost and efforts would have been better spent making good textbooks without coping the feel and layout.

Although for the intended purpose when an instructor says turn to page 120 and lets read that then discuss it does have to be similar.

I'm not pro-copyright or anything I will not respect copyright until the original constitutional time-frame is restored.

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