The Coop Issues Legal Threat Against BrunoBooks

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