Sam Bayard of the CMLP has a thoughtful post on the MediaDefender controversy, the Diebold matter of a few years ago, chilling effects (the project and the concept, both), and the DMCA. Sam’s post is good lawyering, in its way. It made me think about how, in the copyright field, the usual arguments sometimes get twisted around themselves, and we need to think hard about how to untangle them.
The Harvard Cooperative Society — also known as our campus bookseller (also a Barnes & Noble) — has been claiming that it has an “intellectual property” right in the ISBN numbers and/or prices of the textbooks that we as faculty assign to our students. We’ve got an op-ed in The Crimson this morning disputing their IP claims. It’s fairly certain that The Coop can kick students out of their store for many reasons, but the claim of IP in the facts of what books I and others are assigning to our students is off the mark. I for one certainly never conveyed such a right to the Coop.
And the stated concern that “if we don’t have a monopoly on selling textbooks to Harvard students, we won’t sell them at all” seems unlikely to be right. I suspect someone, if not the Coop, (which, to be clear, has a long and storied tradition — starting with few students getting together to sell books in the late 19th century — and from whom I have bought many books as an undergrad, law student, and otherwise), will be willing to sell books to Harvard students.
Eric Savage, (VP of technology at StyleFeeder), has a great, clear, simple post on Russian spam.
Robin Chase, the founder of ZipCar, has a long-awaited next act: GoLoco.org. Some Digital Native creators have posted an amusing YouTube video to introduce the concept. If you’ve loved being a ZipCar user, as I have, GoLoco just might be for you.
