According to the Harvard Coop (a Barnes & Noble college bookstore), the ISBN numbers of books required for courses are their "intellectual property." Or perhaps it's a combination of the ISBN and the price. Or some other basic book information. It's hard to tell exactly what their theory is, because the article in The Harvard Crimson is insufficiently specific about the intellectual property that the Coop is trying to protect, nor whether the Coop is claiming legal protection under copyright, trademark, patent, or trade secrets law. Normally it's important to determine the specifics of a legal claim before ridiculing it, because intellectual property law is a complex and mysterious ruminant prone to devouring both reason and common sense and spitting them back out as an unrecognizable pile of rules and regulations. The Coop is just making this up, however, using "intellectual property" as a magical incantation that supposedly justifies whatever they want to do. It's IP theater, just as confiscating water in airports is security theater.
Vardibidian posted about IP theater last month, when a civil service exam warned test-takers against writing down any of the questions, claiming that would be just as much copyright infringement as listening to a song on the radio and writing it down. (Gosh, those darn kids are writing down songs again. I knew they were up to no good.)
Last week I posted about trying to create a clear and sensible software license. I'd like my users to understand that copyright law does actually say they aren't allowed to distribute copies of the software to all of their friends. That gets harder when there are idiots in positions of apparent authority claiming that copyright law says you can't write down a song or an ISBN. So, Harvard Coop, for the sake of those of us who actually create something, please stop with the IP theater. And if you really want to help lower textbook prices as you tell professors, maybe you should welcome some comparison shopping.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
IP theater
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2 comments:
The "IP theater" concept leads me to wonder if political theater in general is a more severe obstacle to meaningful political discourse and political action at present in the U.S. than it used to be.
I don't recall reading a whole lot about such shenanigans in the nineteenth century, but I sometimes wonder if historians, in looking for what really mattered, are skipping over the political theater of the times.
Perhaps there are more idiots in authority nowadays?
I am enjoying the blog, btw! Thanks for starting it!
A bizarre follow-up: The Coop called the cops on three students yesterday who were collecting ISBNs for their price comparison site. The Cambridge police neither arrested the students nor removed them from the store.
Obviously, it's preferable (and increasingly unusual) when the police decline to arrest people who are not breaking any laws. But I thought that a store was allowed to demand that a patron leave even if the patron is not breaking a law, as long as the store is not discriminating on the basis of a protected class. And if the patron refuses to leave, generally the police are called in to remove the patron. So what happened here?
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