As a college student, one of the things that bugs me is the textbook racket. Most students are scraping by working jobs & taking out loans to pay for tuition, board & transportation, only to be screwed over at the University bookstore.
Depending on the class, students sometimes are required to get $100+ textbooks. Get enough classes & you're looking at the equivalent of a month's rent to purchase a semester's worth of textbooks. And when the semester is over & you go to the campus bookstore to sell the books back, the school will gladly give you back a fraction of what you paid, if they'll even buy the books back at all. Elementary calculus hasn't changed much in the last century, but the University will screw over its students by forcing a new edition on them.
It would be a more honest situation if the cashiers at the campus bookstore had ski-masks and guns.
Well, Harvard has taken matters to another level. In order to stop students from comparing the prices between the bookstore & online alternatives, Harvard is claiming that if a student writes down ISBN numbers & prices, it's a copyright violation.
I have to believe that Harvard isn't hurting for money. I mean most people going there, probabbly have a Mommy & Daddy who spent a small fortune on tuition for them to attend. So is it necessary to squeeze some more blood from the stone at the God damn bookstore?
According to The Harvard Crimson, officials at "The Coop" (Harvard's bookstore) threw a student out for writing down prices.
Taking notes in class may be encouraged, but apparently it can get you kicked out of the Coop.
Jarret A. Zafran ’09 said he was asked to leave the Coop after writing down the prices of six books required for a junior Social Studies tutorial he hopes to take. "I’m a junior and every semester I do the same thing. I go and look up the author and the cost and order the ones that are cheaper online and then go back to the Coop to get the rest," Zafran said.
"I’m not a rival bookstore, I’m a student with an I.D.," he added.
Coop President Jerry P. Murphy ’73 said that while there is no Coop policy against individual students copying down book information, "we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes."
The apparent new policy could be a response to efforts by Crimsonreading.org—an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers—from writing down the ISBN identification numbers for books at the Coop and then using that information for their Web site.
Murphy said the Coop considers that information the Coop’s intellectual property.
Now I'm not an expert in copyright law, but I think maybe Mr. Murphy should run across the campus & talk to some of the people in Harvard's very expensive law department, which I would think he sells very expensive books for. You can't copyright a fact. You can only copyright intellectual property that has creative value, and a price on a store shelf or barcode number doesn't quite fall in that realm.
In other copyright news, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is in the middle of a case where the defendant is putting up a pretty affirmative defense.
In UMG v. Lindor, Marie Lindor is a home health aide who claims she has never bought, used, or even turned on a computer in her life, but has been sued by the RIAA in Brooklyn federal court for using an "online distribution system" to "download, distribute, and/or make available for distribution" music files.
Lindor's attorney began by objecting to the damages requested by the RIAA. The RIAA's standard damage request is $750 per track. Lindor & othet defendants asked for the wholesale price that record companies charge to legal file-sharing services like Apple for singles sold on iTunes. Lo & behold it wasn't $750, but more like 70 cents. A markup of 1,071%, which Lindor's attorneys argued was unconstitutional while seeking more discovery on the pricing informaion from the record companies. The record companies in pre-trial motions attempted to squash this defense & the discovery of their pricing plans, but were rebuked by the trial judge.
This month, the record companies are attempting to squash another of Lindor's defenses. Her attorneys plan to argue that the actions of the RIAA itself is an illegal cartel who are misusing their copyrights in violation of the antitrust act.
"The plaintiffs, who are competitors, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and of public policy, by tying their copyrights to each other, collusively litigating and settling all cases together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in accordance with a uniform agreement, and through common lawyers, thus overreaching the bounds and scope of whatever copyrights they might have. As such, they are guilty of misuse of their copyrights.
[...]It has been the law at least since 1979, not only in the Second Circuit but throughout the United States, that copyright pooling by competitors raises a copyright misuse issue which is to be resolved by a rule of reason analysis. See, e.g., Broadcast Music, Inc. v. Hearst/ABC Viacom, supra, at 326 (SDNY 1990)(Keenan, J.)
It is of more than passing interest that, while they devoted a third of their brief to the totally inapposite affirmative defense of the Noerr-Pennington doctrine ...., and most of the rest of the brief to the pleading requirements for antitrust claims which haven’t been interposed in this case, plaintiffs have not devoted a single word of their brief to supporting the reasonableness of their copyright-pooling behavior, which ultimately would be their only possibly meritorious answer to Ms. Lindor’s charges of copyright misuse. I.e., we are still left wondering, although they had another 15 pages or so left to them under the Court’s page-limit requirements, what lawful, "procompetitive" explanation they might possibly have offered for their admitted copyright-pooling agreement that would enable it to survive a rule of reason analysis. We need to know why six (6) different multibillion dollar, multinational corporations did in fact need to pool all their resources to join forces against a home health aide living in Brooklyn, and found it impossible to negotiate settlements with her and others like her other than pursuant to an impermeable, seamless joint front, apart from the obvious explanation that they did it to increase their leverage in bludgeoning defendants into a defenseless posture, where accepting an extortionate settlement demand would be their only means of averting financial ruin."
The RIAA, as the music industry's trade group, represents most of the major labels & the distributors of over 90% of the recorded music created in the United States. In actions similar to Lindor's case, they've went as far as.....