April 16, 2008

Publishers Sue Georgia State U. for Copyright Infringement

Three scholarly publishers — Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications — sued George State University in federal court on Tuesday, alleging “systematic, widespread, and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works.”

The complaint focuses on course reading materials that are digitally distributed through “a variety of online systems and outlets” run by Georgia State.

The publishers allege that Georgia State has “facilitated, enabled, encouraged, and induced professors” to use those systems to distribute “many, if not all, of the assigned readings for a course” in a manner that far exceeds fair use.

University officials have so far declined to comment on the allegations, according to The New York Times, which reported on the lawsuit this morning.

E-reserves and other digital means of distributing copyrighted material have become an increasingly sore subject for publishers. In a statement supporting the publishers’ action, the Association of American University Presses noted that electronic distribution of books and journals “has become a significant problem for university presses, who depend upon the income due them to continue to publish the specialized scholarly books required to educate students and to advance university research.”

The Association of American Publishers also supports the lawsuit. —Jennifer Howard

Comments

1. Not sure of any details on this matter, but Georgia State is typically a squeaky clean institution. Not having a football program up to now has helped keep them clean…….

   — GT    Apr 16, 04:04 PM    #

2. Families struggling finanically every semester to keep their students in college will probably be very understanding of colleges looking for legal ways to help their students avoid paying the extremely high costs of textbooks. We all should be looking out for the interests of our educators and students and be in strong support of the open access movement which gives the authors/originators of the scholarship control over who has access to the information produced. Publishers should find a way to support and fit into this model for the greater good, not the bottom line. For tenure review, universities should move towards acknowlegement of alternative ways of adding to the scholarship of a discipline in addition to the current for-profit publishing model.

   — CAR    Apr 16, 04:10 PM    #

3. Oxford and Cambridge University Presses need to go to Asia, India, Russia and China and not focus on the over burdened American college students). It is outrageous that American college students have to subsidize the cost of books and educational material which are sold as Chinese, Indian, Asian international student editions offshore at a fraction of what they charge the American college students, libraries. With the trade deficits which India, Asia and China have with the West, American and British publishers (as a consortium) should be allowed to add a 5-15 percent tax on all Chinese, Asian and Indian imports to the European Union and the United States and the money be used to continue to provide the great books and educational material as they have in the past. With the record tuition increases, cost of housing and now cost of texts, something has to give. The American college students in addition have to subsidize a lot of the high level research, subsidizing the pay for the foreign PhD students, postdocs and even visiting academics. Georgia Tech appears to now be asking Oxford and Cambridge University Press to also start contributing. But what this really shows is that the current system of American college students and their parents subsidizing the university research endeavors is not longer sustainable. Time to create a Manhattan Project type of think thank, gather the best European and American minds together and find a win (American and European university students) win (American and European universities) win (European and American publishers, who by the way have started to outsource some of their publication to India, China and Asia, so they should be able to sell the texts very cheaply and still make a profit) solution. Another solution is for the publisher to do the complete publishing in the United States and provide jobs in the USA. To continue to publish the books in India, Asia and China, they should be able to reduce the price like they have when they sell them in India, China and Asia, and still make a profit. So the publishers share some of the blame by doing so much outsourcing of the publishing.

   — Karl    Apr 16, 05:27 PM    #

4. The publishers have NO publication cost, no shipping cost, … It would be interesting to see what their arguments are. If they assume that the students would buy the books if the lecture notes were not provided free of charge (the students have to pay for the PRINTING COST!! and the TUITION!!), I think they are wrong.

   The students who are paying the tuition should be able to get copies of lectures notes from their academics. Otherwise what are they paying the money for. Here in Australia the academics have a moral, ethic and social responsibility to provide electronic copies of lecture notes, which are of the same quality as OUP and Cambridge University Press, but not pinched from the commercial publishers or other academics, without their written consent.

   That is what they are paid to do. They cannot lift the material from other authors and publishers and pass it off as their own work. This is plagiarism. So just like in research, every academic should prepare his own set of lecture notes, and the lecture notes should be checked with the plagiarism tools we use to check the students’ works and writings. I would suspect that a lot of lazy academics would be and are guilty of plagiarism and copyright infringement. So OUP and Cambridge University Press have a legitimate grievance. Georgia State probably made the mistake of giving the world open access. Many universities have Intranets, which only give access to the students registered for the course/unit or to other university students. But if OUP and Cambridge University Press had privy access to the material being provided to the students, I think they and other academics would also have legitimate grievances.

   — Karl    Apr 16, 05:40 PM    #

5. These are trouble times for intellectual property rights. First with music, where widespread file-sharing was justified because CD’s cost pennies to produce, record companies makes lots of money, and everybody is doing it! Now it has moved to textbooks where the rationale is much the same. It is still theft, no matter how you try and justify it. That sound you hear is our cultural morality eroding away…

   — cb    Apr 16, 05:47 PM    #

6. I don’t get it. When using course management systems, why don’t faculty give citations to articles and send students to library databases where they can retrieve the articles directly.

   This is especially important for small journals who can use the download counts (200 instead of 1) and gets students comfortable with actually accessing and using journals instead of relying on their profs. to deliver it to them.

   — William    Apr 16, 06:09 PM    #

7. The cost of textbooks is definitely alarming, but that does not give anyone the right to distribute the material.
   I agree that many professors are simply being lazy and, rather than composing their own supplementary materials, are simply posting published alternatives. Professors also need to be aware of the cost of books they are requiring. Many textbooks are chosen by faculty who have not seen the prices for the items.
   Eventually, I think most of this will get worked out. This is yet another case of technology advancing faster than commerce.

   — Dustin    Apr 16, 06:43 PM    #

8. Karl has turned this case into India bashing forum. The Asian editions are printed in India at less than one-twentieth the cost of printing in USA. so it is reasonable to sell the books at one-tenth the US price. If they are sold at the same price as in US, NO ONE in India will be able to afford the books.

   — Sam    Apr 16, 07:04 PM    #

9. Sam wrote:
   The Asian editions are printed in India at less than one-twentieth the cost of printing in USA. so it is reasonable to sell the books at one-tenth the US price. If they are sold at the same price as in US, NO ONE in India will be able to afford the books.

   Using the same reasoning, if they are made electronically available and the students in the USA and Europe pay for the cost of printing, they they should be even cheaper than in India. a few rupees. People in India assume that the American college students are rich. Most have NO INCOMES. Many of the students at Indian and Chinese Universities are from the Upper Castes are not as poor as they are made out to be. I agree with the students from the Lower Castes getting the books cheaper, but this cost should be born by the many Indian, Asian and Chinese companies which are getting a lot of outsourced work from the UK, the States and Continental Europe. These countries can now afford to educate their students at Western costs. Just like real natural resources, natural, gas, gold, .. the Indians, Chinese and Asians can pay. So they should pay the real cost of educational materials, books, .. It is the absolutely right thing go do. They are no longer their world countries like many in Africa and South America. They need to start being much more responsible with respect to IP and Copyright laws.

   — Karl    Apr 17, 07:59 AM    #

10. This isn’t a philosophical concern about the nature of copyright violations, this is a matter of $$$. It’s not as though GSU doesn’t have to pay for access to these journals! With added conditions comes added cost. The publishers wish simply to squeeze every dollar they can from the users. These costs show up, if nowhere else, in the cost of the subscriptions that institutions like GSU must pay for and maintain

    — Norbert    Apr 17, 09:16 AM    #

11. When you’re talking about a total of 6,700 works, as stated in the complaint, it seems logical to assume that the works are a combination of monographs, edited collections, textbooks, and trade literature, not just journals (or books printed in India).

    It’s easy to point fingers, but with 6,700 titles involved, this case sounds fairly complex. One wonders how the evidence was collected.

    — CL    Apr 17, 12:59 PM    #

12. GSU probably has a current enrollment of more than 35,000 students and probably spends well over a $1 million per year on library resources, a good portion of which are in electronic format. Furtherm it is very likely that the licensing fees paid to these vendors for these electronic materials probably allows use of the same materials (in these electronic databases) for placement on “Reserve” via electronic links.

    These vendors are going after the very market that supports them. Frankly, if universities the size of GSU were to stop buying from SAGE, Cambridge and Oxford, they’d be in real financial trouble.

    It is also probable that a number of GSU faculty have written content for these vendors — yet they had to give up copyright to get published. Frankly, I think it’s about time that libraries educate faculty to NOT give up copyright, and begin to support publishing in such a way that their universities don’t have to put up with these absurd demands that they pay yet again for the content they are already paying through the nose for.

    This is going to be an interesting lawsuit as some of the law professors at GSU Law School are pretty sharp. It also will make a lot of libraries think twice about buying books and other resources from these vendors if another publisher offers similar materials on the same subject.

    — rns    Apr 17, 09:28 PM    #

13. This has inspired me to write a list of publisher contacts for student complaints. That ways when students complain to me at the reference desk, I can point them to the real culprits.

    — JR    Apr 22, 12:47 PM    #

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