It's fashionable among academic to bash presses like Elsevier etc. for their pricing -- with good reason, of course. But Cambridge (JHET's own) and Oxford are not all pure either. As some of you may know, they had sued my university over a matter of "fair use" of academic material (Cambridge et al. v. Georgia State U). Essentially, the outrageous position of Cambridge et al. is that any online posting of copyright material over four pages - including use for courses - requires paying permission fees. Additionally, it would hold universities responsible for all online posting by professors, requiring them to sign off on each case. Paul Courant, economist and dean of libraries at the U of Michigan, and Kevin Smith, a librarian at Duke, have been blogging about the case regularly. They've called Cambridge's position "extreme", "a nightmare scenario", and "a declaration of war on faculty." A few links are given below: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2011/05/13/a-nightmare-scenario-for-higher-education/ http://paulcourant.net/2011/06/09/the-georgia-state-filing-a-declaration-of-war-on-the-faculty/ http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/05/12/the-gsu-decision-not-an-easy-road-for-anyone/ Fortunately, a federal judge ruled this week largely in GSU's favor, throwing out 94 of 99 cases of alleged copyright infringement and forcing Cambridge et al. to go back to court for the other 5. Spencer Banzhaf ----------------------------------- H. Spencer Banzhaf Associate Professor Department of Economics Andrew Young School of Policy Studies PO Box 3992 Georgia State University Atlanta, GA 30302 404-413-0252 http://www2.gsu.edu/~prchsb/