(Note: This is a story about the Harvard Coop, the college’s official bookseller, not the Harvard Book Store, which is an indie shop just a few blocks away.)
Thanks to boingboing, I’ve been doing my best to keep up on what’s happening at the Harvard Coop since a student was ejected for writing down ISBN numbers and prices so he could check online to see if he could find the books cheaper, then three more students, collecting the same data for the CrimsonReading.org website, were ejected. All along, the Coop has maintained that the ISBNs are its intellectual property. But the director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, along with another Berkman Fellow and a Harvard law student, has written an op-ed for the Harvard Crimson that says the Coop’s argument is totally bogus. “The Coop neither authored the ISBN numbers on its books nor compiled them in an original selection or arrangement,” the trio writes. “Locking competitors out from price comparison is not part of copyright’s aim. While some courts have protected the creativity of price estimates, they haven’t allowed companies to exclude others from learning market prices or catalog part numbers.”