All your ISBNs are belong to us
Ah, those Ivy League schools. They're so advanced. So far out in front of the rest of society, in research, in science, in intellectual resources.
And, it appears, in wildly ambitious interpretations of intellectual property. The Harvard Crimson reports that the campus co-op bookstore expels students who take notes and compare prices on textbooks. The bookstore claims that the ISBNs of the books on the shelves are its intellectual property.
Discussion, paranoid and otherwise, at Slashdot. I can't wait until car dealers follow suit and decide that the specifications of the cars on their lots are "intellectual property", and that their customers therefore are not allowed to take notes and compare prices at other dealerships.
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When I was in school, a cashier at the campus bookstore caught me writing down ISBNs and asked what I was doing. I told him that I was copying the ISBN numbers so that I could go buy my books online. I was promptly told that I was being "unethical" and asked to leave the store.
When it turned out that the campus bookstore actually had a lower price on one of my books, I happily paid the higher price online just out of spite.
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