Joe Miller and I have written a new IP Survey book and we are looking for some “beta testers” to try it out next semester. The book is entirely in digital form. If a student would like a hard copy they are free to print out the book or any part of it. Also, there is a full digital statutory supplement that comes with the book – at no extra charge to the students. You can view a table of contents online.

We are offering this book through a new publishing company that we started, called Semaphore Press, using a “radiohead” distribution model: students are given a suggested price of $30 for the book, but can elect to pay something different (more or less). They can even not pay anything by clicking on the “Freeride” button. You can read more about the publishing company and its philosophy at
http://www.semaphorepress.com/ As a professor interested in reviewing the book, you can always click on the “freeride” button at the bottom of the payment page to take a look at the entire book (or any part).

Prof. Miller is using this book this fall at the University of Georgia and I’m using it at Lewis & Clark (in two separate sections). We have found that students like the flexibility that the digital format offers. One student even prepared audio files of the different chapters so that he could listen to the book while commuting. And, we also found that students appreciate the reasonable pricing of the book, with a majority of them opting to pay the suggested price.

Let us know if you are interested in adopting this book. While neither you nor your school’s bookstore needs to “order” anything from us, we would like to know who is adopting the book so we can continue to evaluate the book, the distribution model, and in general seek feedback from the beta testers! We also have a survey that we would appreciate having students complete at the end of the term. We are also happy to share our power point files and syllabi.

Here, again, is the link to Intellectual Property Law: Cases & Materials. Try it out — you’ll see that the site is designed so that users are strongly channeled through the “pay something” page. I wonder if the authors’ pay rate will remain high as the relationship between them and the students attenuates (e.g. if profs at other schools assign this book)? I guess we’ll find out soon.

Not to be outdone, Prof. Thomas Field of Franklin Pierce School of Law mentions that he offers a free textbook for download via SSRN: Fundamentals of Intellectual Property: Cases & Materials. The digital version is free; a microprint costs around $16-17 right now.

Well, I exaggerate: Here’s yet another example of a professor bucking the publishing system and getting materials out there, for free. Noel Capon, a professor of marketing at Columbia Business School, is releasing “Managing Marketing in the 21st Century” Radiohead-style: students (or I suppose, anyone) pay what they feel like. That could — and probably is, in most cases — nothing. Nonetheless, Prof. Capon feels that the benefits of getting his work out there beats the hassle of dealing with unresponsive publishers.

“After all these bad experiences, I decided to publish it myself… The leading book in my field is north of $150. It’s just out of sight. It’s become this major social issue now.”

update: Interestingly, this article has hit the top-10 most emailed on the Times, on a day when politics and economics otherwise reign supreme.

“I’m a right-wing economist, so they can’t call me a communist,” he is quoted as saying.

If there’s a limitation with Prof. McAfee’s approach, it’s that he seems to be doing it in a vacuum. The article mentions Connexions in an aside, which is more than just an e-publishing tool but, like eLangdell, an entire platform for exchanging teaching materials.

More discussion of this effort on Slashdot.

Textbooks, free and illegal, online: Use of pirated works hurting publishers

I’m sure that piracy is cutting into sales, but as is typical, the story lacks any quantitative data substantiating its overall alarmist tone.

As far as eLangdell is concerned, this passage is particularly telling:

Some instructors avoid textbooks altogether, while still making use of the Web. “I have over the last five years or so stopped the practice of assigning textbooks,” said Vincent Rocchio, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “Instead, I publish a group of essays electronically on my course website.”

Rocchio said “the outrageous cost of textbooks” makes it cheaper for him to purchase electronic publishing rights and pass the lower costs on to the students.

Harvard Law School’s faculty unanimously last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available
online for free. The school’s announcement, issued today, notes that Harvard is the first law schol to make this commitment to open access. (Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences had also voted unanimously for open access in February.)

Joe asked what new innovations we might expect with the appointment of John Palfrey to Harvard’s newly created position of Associate Dean of Library and Information Resources. Here is what he had to say about this new development:

This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law School community can take great pride… The acceptance of open
access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible
today and into the future. I look forward to the work of implementing
this commitment.

Law schools, quite unlike almost every other academic institution in the United States, occupy an enviable position because we almost all have retained full rights and permissions to our own scholarship. For all the grumbling faculty occasionally evince about student- rather than peer-edited journals, this has also proven a tremendous advantage for schools, as there are no contracts and rights to negotiate with third-party publishers. Thus legal scholarship has the potential to leap forward by large bounds with policies like Harvard’s in place.

1. From my experience in running a legal aid website for the general public, education is different than just putting information out there.
• A course textbook is a curated selection, not an open database.
• Education is knowledge that is highly mediated by culture, as is teaching itself.
2. Detour: Consider whether computers allow us a quantum leap from information to systems; that is, games illustrate how you can “publish” systems
3. eLangdell goes beyond e-books into networked knowledge — which is really more about creating a culture of knowledge.
4. (I went on to describe eLangdell as I’ve usually done in the past.)
5. What happens to publishers?
• The role of editors (= community managers?)
• Distribution (= user interface?)
• Marketing
• Validation
6. Aren’t these publisher functions what librarians do? Are they something that librarians can and should be doing in a new world of global commons publishing?

While I’ve been speaking of “communities of practice” often with reference to eLangdell, my recent thinking about postmodernism and knowledge has thoroughly permeated my current description of eLangdell. Understanding knowledge through the lens of culture is a thoroughly postmodern concept. I think it’s also a cornerstone of eLangdell’s multiple-paths view of the future of legal education.

“Books are a big scam” he said.

Say what? There were some slightly startled chuckles from the students.

“I taught law at the University of Chicago for 10 years,” he explained. “One of the biggest scams is law professors write their own textbooks and then assign it to their students, and they make a mint.

“It’s a huge racket,” he added.

I’ve spoken now to quite a few law professors who write casebooks, and very few are making a “mint.” But, while “big scam” and “huge racket” seem a bit strong, I do think that textbooks don’t need to be as expensive as they are. Obama’s attack on textbooks is more accurate in the K-12 and college markets than the one he specifically referred to (law); see, for example, the PIRG’s campaign to lower textbook costs.

Which is not to say that law school casebooks aren’t expensive or that they can’t be cheaper. We hope that the eLangdell project will not only produce better and more customized casebooks (our first priority) but also more affordable ones.

A basic dilemma facing educational fair use is that it’s stuck between too much specificity (cutting out potentially fair uses) and too much vagueness (leading teachers to avoid risk by stopping far short of fair use). To the extent that specific guidelines are available, they’ve been shaped by the publishing industry and drafted without serious input from users (input letters not published), lack legal standing (court in a coursepack case argued need to go back to the copyright statute itself), unclear if they are minimum or maximum allowed (NYU, under litigation threat, treated guidelines as max, now followed by 4 of 5 universities.

What can be done?

1. Give up on fair use altogether
2. Create guidelines: The status quo
3. Develop best practices: Get use communities to articulate their discipline’s norms around fair use. See the documentary filmmakers.

Lewis now advocates the third path, putting emphasis on the process of involving community rather than the legal requirements imposed by the law. The point would be that the community develops its own norms and establishes common-sense fairness before checking for legal acceptability. The next critical step would be winning buy-in from the entire community, especially those who might otherwise stand in the way.

John Wilbanks of Science Commons suggested reframing the issue as “The Right to Teach,” which strikes me as an incredibly powerful way to assert the positive value of fair use (which, after all, is a negative cutout of copyright).

I mentioned that for eLangdell, a legal education commons at CALI and backed by Berkman, would love to be part of a pilot project to identify best practices and be protected by any litigation defense system that can be set up in connection with these practices.