While the Harvard Coop is a haven
for books that encourage intellectual
discovery, the bookstore is once again
trying to limit access to its pricing information.
On Feb. 4, Barnes & Noble Inc.,
which manages the Coop bookstore,
sent a cease and desist letter to BrunoBooks.com CEO Jesse Maddox, threatening
legal action unless the Web site
stopped taking textbook information
from the Coop’s site.
BrunoBooks—a service operated
out of Brown University—collects textbook
information from stores at various
colleges, including the Harvard Coop,
and allows students to compare prices
against those of online vendors. Last fall, BrunoBooks merged with the similar
Harvard-based service CrimsonReading.
org, which was founded by Tom D.
Hadfield ’08 and Jon T. Staff ’10 in 2006
to help students find cheaper textbooks.
The cease and desist letter claims
that “Brunobooks.com misappropriated
and infringed Barnes & Noble’s rights in
the Copyrighted Database by removing
the Copyrighted Database from the
Harvard Web site and placing it on the
Brunobooks web site.”
According to Coop President Jerry P.
Murphy ’73, the “copyrighted database”
that the letter refers to includes book
titles, as well as used and new textbook
prices. But Maddox says Barnes & Noble’s
claims are unsubstantiated, since
this information is in the public domain
and cannot be copyrighted.
The Coop’s Web site lists textbooks
by departments and courses, and also
includes publisher and edition information.
“We aggregate all that information,”
Murphy said. “We don’t want people to
take advantage of the fruits of our labor.”
Though he acknowledged that the
actual titles and prices of the textbooks
were probably not protected by copyright
law, he said that he opposed competitors
taking information from the
Coop’s Web site.
Though Murphy
said that it is
“absolutely fine”
for students to jot
down numbers
from the Coop for
their own price
comparison, he
said that individual
consumers’
actions differ
from BrunoBooks
“wholesale, electronically
scraping
all the information
from the Web site.”
A HISTORY OF TENSION
The cease and desist letter was not the
first legal encounter between the Coop
and textbook price comparison services.
In Sept. 2007, the Coop called the Cambridge
Police Department after employees
from CrimsonReading—who were manually
writing down textbook ISBN numbers
in the Coop—refused to leave the
store. But the police made no arrests, and
three affiliates of the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society later denounced the
Coop’s actions in a Crimson editorial, arguing
that CrimsonReading had not violated
copyright law.
“[W]hile copyright law might prohibit
students from dropping by with scanners,
it doesn’t stop them from noting what
books are on the shelf and how much they
cost,” wrote law school professor John G.
Palfrey ’94, visiting Berkman fellow Wendy
M. Seltzer ’96, and Angela Kang, then a
second-year law student.
After this incident and the subsequent
backlash, the Coop backed down and
CrimsonReading
continued compiling
textbook ISBN
numbers from the
store.
“The Coop
started looking the
other way,” Staff
said.
Beginning this
past fall, BrunoBooks began taking
information from
the Coop’s Web
site rather than
the store itself. But rather than turning a
blind eye to BrunoBooks’ practices, Barnes
& Noble’s cease and desist letter is now threatening to press charges against what Staff calls an “analogous action.”
EMPTY CLAIMS?
Maddox said that the Coop’s current
claims against BrunoBooks closely resemble
the 2007 incident involving CrimsonReading,
and that the only difference is
that the book titles and prices are now being
taken from the Coop’s Web site instead
of being manually copied down in-store.
He said that there was still no legal
basis for Barnes & Noble’s claims against
BrunoBooks.
Legal experts from the Berkman center
agreed.
“I think Barnes & Noble is deliberating
misinterpreting the law,” said Seltzer,
one of the authors of the 2007 editorial.
“They’re claiming broader protections
than the law would give us.”
According to Seltzer, who read the cease
and desist letter, copyright law only covers
the selection and arrangement of factual
information and not the information itself,
such as textbook titles and prices.
“From what I’ve seen, I don’t think
there’s a basis for a legal claim,” she said.
Though the letter said that further legal
action would be taken if BrunoBooks did
not respond within seven days, Maddox
said that Barnes & Noble has not followed
up on its threats, although three months
have passed.
“It just shows the emptiness of their
claims,” he said. “This is just another instance
of a big corporation trying to bully
a small startup on the basis of false legal
claims.”
Maddox said that BrunoBooks is not
planning to respond with legal action of
its own, and is simply hoping that Barnes
& Noble will retract the letter.
Staff—who is still involved with BrunoBooks
on the Harvard campus—said
that the company plans to obtain textbook
information from the Coop’s Web site
again in the fall semester.
“We’re going to continue doing what
we’ve been doing and what we’re legally
entitled to do,” Staff said.
—Staff writer Liyun Jin can be reached at ljin@fas.harvard.edu
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