The suit filed by Faulkner Press against a local note-taking company gained national attention when it was picked up by Wired and subsequently linked to by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing.

The day after the Alligator covered the issue they were kind enough to include the short version of a response from one of our officers, Patrick Flanagan. Here is the longer version of the opinion, which also touches on the substantial problems that Faulkner material has caused due to their restrictive programming:

Faulkner Press is suing Einstein’s Notes for copying class notes without the professor’s permission. Wait, what? I thought college was about passing on knowledge. I guess Faulkner Press disagrees.

Einstein’s Notes service is one that many of my friends and peers value greatly. They value it enough that they’re willing to spend $20 on a notes packet every time their class has a test. The note takers are paid well for their time, and the note buyers are satisfied with the product they receive. It’s a nice example of the free market, but Faulkner Press is upset that
“their” intellectual property is being misused.

This falls so neatly into the “Fair Use” clause of U.S. copyright law: “the fair use of a copyrighted work… for purposes such as… teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use) [and] scholarship… is not an infringement of copyright.” Furthermore, “ideas, … concepts, principles” cannot be copyrighted. And to nail the lid on the coffin, Einstein’s Notes doesn’t just blindly redistribute the source material verbatim; they offer a new product: a summary of the professor’s lecture, and a compilation of useful material for the class. They cite their sources, which is all that is required when using these materials for their notes. Case closed.

I’m actually not surprised that it’s Faulkner Press who is bringing this lawsuit. If you’ve ever used a Faulkner Press digital textbook, you know what I’m talking about. They’re obscenely overpriced, poorly programmed, and restrictive enough to be called suffocating. Their software won’t even let you select text, for fear that you’ll distribute it to the masses. Never mind that you’re a student, trying to write a 10-page philosophy paper, and you have to hand type block quotes from Socrates instead of just copy-pasting.

U.S. copyright law is far from perfect (see the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The fair use clause, however, is one of those laws where the government got something right. If Class Notes (the parent company of Einstein’s Notes) loses this case, then maybe it’s time to take a closer look at intellectual property legislation and fix it once and for all.

This is the digital millennium, and information is literally in the air. The free flow of information is absolutely critical to a democratic society. The University of Florida is a place of learning. Let’s not suffocate ourselves by depriving us of knowledge.

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Slashdot reported today that the 44 claims made in Blackboard’s patents have been rejected after reexamintion by the US Patent Office. There is still a period for comment by both Blackboard and the corporation they are suing, called Desire2Learn, which is why this decision is labeled as non-final.

The patents granted were widely criticized as being too trivial and too broad, allowing Blackboard to sue basically any competitor of learning management systems. Blackboard’s is the “Learning System” used by the University of Florida.

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UF’s campus newspaper the Independent Florida Alligator has an interesting Editorial on privacy violations in Tuesday’s issue. They chastise the mainstream press for highlighting the privacy breach concerning the Democratic candidates’ passport snoopings while ignoring the plentiful and massive security breaches of Joe Gator personal information. They point out that “there is still no national law to protect the privacy of the information you share online.”

Even a few years ago such a niche topic would probably not have been taken serious by many students but the increased time spent on social networking sites and the Internet in general seems to have changed that.

The Alligator remains skeptical about any of this changing soon but of course: knowing is half the battle.

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Following on the resolution that UF’s Student Senate passed in May 2006, two more student governments have issued official statements of support.

• Trinity University: The Association of Student Representatives adopted its resolution on March 26, 2007.
• Oberlin College: The Student Senate adopted its resolution on March 18, 2007.

(Via Open Access News)

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In response to the resolution that UF’s Student Senate passed in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act, Stevan Harnad has blogged a list of suggestions: What Students Can Do To Support OA.

There’s also a section for students in Peter Suber’s What you can do to promote open access.

Two suggestions I’d make, that anyone can do:

• Sign the Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States
• Join Access to Research Now! on Facebook (if you use Facebook)

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This weekend, Nile and I are headed to Memphis for the National Conference on Media Reform. We’ll be blogging updates and posting photos when we can. See you when we get back!

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On 29 December, the FCC approved the merger of AT&T and BellSouth, after AT&T submitted a revised set of conditions, including the following Net Neutrality pledge:

AT&T/BellSouth also commits that it will maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service. This commitment shall be satisfied by AT&T/BellSouth’s agreement not to provide or to sell to Internet content, application, or service providers, including those affiliated with AT&T/BellSouth, any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes any packet transmitted over AT&T/BellSouth’s wireline broadband Internet access service based on its source, ownership or destination.

Now, this still permits Quality of Service based on traffic type, such as prioritizing streaming media, but such QOS measures would have to apply to everyone’s streaming media equally.

All in all, a big win!

Further coverage:
Tim Wu, Why AT&T’s Net Neutrality Concession is a Milestone in the History of the Internet
AT&T’s Final Merger Committments, FCC Filing

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