Textbook Publishers Sue Open Source Alternative

Textbook publishers Pearson, Cengage Learning, and MacMillan Higher Education are suing open source textbook startup Boundless for copyright infringement.  Boundless offers their texts as a free, open-source alternative to specific textbooks by collecting free information from across the web and organizing them into an approximation of the copyrighted textbooks.  The claims of the publishers focus less on direct quotation or paraphrasing (which Boundless doesn't do), but rather copying the format of the published texts too closely.  This is an interesting case to watch concerning copyright that you can read more about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I can't say for sure that what Boundless is doing constitutes copyright infringement, but as a student I welcome any open source alternative to pricey educational materials.