Nation's Largest Textbook Seller Copyrights Class Textbook Listings: "

College students are all too familiar with paying heavy prices for textbooks. So it should come as no surprise that the nation's leading collegiate book provider is targeting an online competitor with a federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act lawsuit.

Follett Higher Education Group, the nation's largest wholesaler of higher education textbooks, is targeting California-based Ugenie, alleging that part of Ugenie's online textbook comparison shopping service contains pilfered data from Follett. The allegedly purloined data, which Follett says is copyright protected, is publicly available

The lawsuit, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, raises questions of how far the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects publicly available material that is assembled on a commercial web site. The case also raises privacy interests, as Follett claims Ugenie has unleashed so-called 'bots' onto the efollett.com web site, scooping up vast quantities of data in violation of its user agreement and data that would otherwise be impossible for a single user to acquire.

Follett says it spends millions of dollars doing the research, and aggregates the information at effollett.com, where students can easily purchase textbooks for thousands of university classes by plugging in their institution and course number. Its lawsuit says Ugenie trespasses in Follett's servers, steals its data and uses that data on its own competing site that outpoints to students where they can buy cheaper books.

'Ugenie has systematically and surreptitiously used a scraper or 'bot' to misappropriate competitively sensitive and exceedingly valuable data from Follett's computer networks,' said the lawsuit, filed Oct. 19. 'Ugenie has used that data to divert sales from Follett and to generate profits for itself.'

Follett says it has invested more than $14 million and 100,000 hours 'developing this data system.'

The case is similar to Los Angeles federal court litigation where a judge last week issued an injunction against RMG Technologies, which sold software allowing ticket resellers to scoop up unlimited tickets at Ticketmaster ahead of the general public, and against Ticketmaster's user policy allowing a limited number of ticket purchases. The Pittsburgh company advertises that it's software is 'stealth technology that lets you hide your IP address, so you never get blocked by Ticketmaster.'

Like the Ticketmaster case, the Follett case alleges the Burlingame company violates Follett's terms of use agreement.

In the textbook case, the user agreement demands that users won't adapt the site's information for commercial gain. The terms of use agreement also 'expressly prohibits automated data gathering' from its site, where all content is copyrighted.

Follett's lawsuit also claims Ugenie's bots have downloaded more than 2 million pages and regularly uses 5 percent of Follett's bandwidth. The lawsuit claims Ugenie's bots circumvent Follett's software -- in violation of the DMCA -- meant to block major downloads of its data.

The lawsuits seeks unspecified damages and a judge's order blocking Ugenie from profiting off the back of its competitor.

Tom Kline, a spokesman for Follett, of Oak Brook, said Ugenie, of Burlingame, is misappropriating its data. Ugenie did not immediately return messages for comment.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)