The main topic in UF’s campus newspaper today was a suit from the software/textbook publisher Faulkner Press against the note-taking service Einstein’s Notes. Their article details the situation and highlights that a previous suits was unsuccessful.

This issue had been raised in the Fall of 2005 by some professors who felt their copyright was violated, also in the Alligator. One of our chapter’s founders, Gavin Baker, replied to them and argued that these companies were doing novel work by summarizing and that facts are actually not copyrightable.

It is interesting to note how the language in these two articles changed and how the emphasis has now shifted towards how lecture notes and practice questions were “copied.” That reasoning might even be successful in front of a judge, compared to the previous attempt.

Faulkner Press’ side can be heard at their site about “The Future of Higher Ed.” It is currently a sparsely populated Wordpress blog with an unrelated stock image on the front page.

The only reasonable response seems to have come from the paper’s cartoonist, who nicely showed that intellectual property protection, as a primary goal, is absolutely flawed in academia: