Duke Professors Looking To Make Legal Texts Affordable; Kicking Off With Intellectual Property Law | Techdirt

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-07-31

Summary:

"James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of the Center of the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School have recognized what many people have: the academic publishing world is insane. Textbook pricing is generally insane, in part because the people who make the decision (the professors) are not the people doing the buying (the students), meaning that the buyers have little to no choice in what they buy. That enables the publishers to jack up the prices to absolutely insane rates. This even includes legal 'casebooks' and 'statutory supplements,' which are often composed of mostly public domain material (or, legal filings where the person who put together the book had no authorship). So Boyle and Jenkins are working on an open coursebook for intellectual property, which looks like it's going to be fantastic. To kick it off, however, they've now released an Intellectual Property Statutory Supplement, which basically has the text of various relevant laws and international agreements concerning intellectual property in the United States. A somewhat equivalent book that many law schools use will run you over $50. But the Boyle/Jenkins statutory supplement is free to download, or available for print-on-demand at cost (around $10) for law students who need paper copies and can't bring electronic copies into classrooms ..."

Link:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140728/17583428039/duke-professors-looking-to-make-legal-texts-affordable-kicking-off-with-intellectual-property-law.shtml

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.duke.u oa.law oa.textbooks oa.students oa.prices oa.publishers oa.policies oa.books

Date tagged:

07/31/2014, 08:04

Date published:

07/31/2014, 04:04