This is tangentially a copyright law story, but it's mostly about very smart college students doing what college students do. And (spoiler alert) about beating the machine. In "Yale Students Tangle With University Over Website" the New York Times reports on two students who built an online blue book, YBB+, that competed with the official college catalog of courses. The college complained that YBB+ was a "big problem" and identified three concerns. The students responded by offering to fix the three things, along with “4. Anything else you want.” The college responded the way colleges do -- they shut the website down. The inevitable outrage ensued. (Examples here and here.) Enter student number three, who quickly figured out how to provide the same blue book information in a way that the university couldn't block. And the university has backed down:
[Q]uestions of who owns data are evolving before our very eyes. Just this weekend, we learned of a tool that replicates YBB+’s efforts without violating Yale’s appropriate-use policy, and that leapfrogs over the hardest questions before us. What we now see is that we need to review our policies and practices.
