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.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-06-29
Except... That's not a correct analogy, since that looks more like a translation than what Boundless is doing.
Boundless is taking existing, original material covered by permissive licenses (e.g. from Wikipedia) to match the material in official, assigned books. The information in the official books is public knowledge - it's how the world works. You can't copyright the laws of thermodynamics. The way the original books are written is copyrighted - but the public sources Boundless draws from are worded entirely differently. However, when you explain the first law of thermodynamics, you only have so many ways of doing so.
Member since:2005-11-29
Writing style, organization, visual design. All of that is unique to the material which they shadow copied (This much, they admit).
How then, given that it is more than general educational facts, does what they do not constitute infringement? Their book isn't just a bullet list of facts, there is a very deliberate style which is unique.
They are surely reducing the revenue of the big publishers, only because they are able to essentially create very similar knock offs of the book.
I think the anti-patent, anti-copyright fever here has turned into almost hysteria. If you keep raising a stink about non-issues like this, you risk drowning out the real legitimate issues out there surrounding patents and other things.
Member since:2005-07-12
While merely wording things differently isn't enough to evade copyright violation, at least with fictional works, it is enough when discussing facts of the world.
However, if the original text uses a bear to describe thermodynamics (as the source cites), then, perhaps a fish farm to describe communicable disease, corn crops for genetic engineering, webbed feet on dogs for selective breeding, etc etc, then Boundless Learning produces a text using the same examples as in the original source (but uses freely available sources), presents them in the same order, with the expressed intent of replacing the original source, there most definitely is a case for a suit.
This does appear to be more than just "It's free? SHUT IT DOWN!!!" but not much more.
Member since:2012-04-08
Member since:2008-12-16
Imagine I wrote a program that does this. Now imagine you wrote a program that does this too, but without any access to my code. This is pretty much what Boundless is doing.
It looks like nowadays you're not supposed to try competing with the established guys. Amazing.
Member since:2007-02-18
No actual text from the original codebase has been copied but the algorithms and design have been.
Does this constitute copyright infringement ?
Not stating an opinion either way - just a useful thought experiment.
Licences like GPL provisions for reverse engineering, which is what this thought experiment is, but not what this open source textbook is about at all. You can't reverse engineer books, especially not in an automated way. For your thought experiment to have any bearing on this situation, you have to prove the open source textbook was done in an analogous way.
Also, what about previous textbooks that the current commercial books obviously pattern themselves after? Or what about curriculum standards that enforce how topics are taught and thus have effect on the layout any textbook has?
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues.""Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently."In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies."The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.
Member since:
2012-04-07
Imagine I wrote a program that parses the source code of a large proprietary C++ codebase and then uses the AST to produce a new codebase in Java - adjusting for the semantic differences between the two languages and changing all the class and variable names.
No actual text from the original codebase has been copied but the algorithms and design have been.
Does this constitute copyright infringement ?
Not stating an opinion either way - just a useful thought experiment.