I know the guys over at Boundless but haven't had a change to ask them if the litigation was known in advance of closing the Series A. It appears the complaint came out a few weeks before the announcement (3/16).
Fighting this to the end could eat up a substantial amount of Venrock's $8M.
Yes, and the older publishers don't have to win, they just have to eat up the capital of their perceived enemy. A common legal tactic.
I'm not familiar with the "look and feel" of books being found to be copyrightable in existing case law. There are a lot of books that are pretty similar to each other out there.
In a forum full of hackers, we should all be able to agree, information is information... Whether its letter order, word order, sentence order, paragraph order or topic order... There is a continuum when it comes to deciding what information is protectable IP. If I order 10 topics, that information is probably not protectable IP. However, if I order 10,000 topics in a tree, that is definitely complex labor-intensive information and should be protectable in the same way that an author can protect his ordering of 10,000 words.
Is there complex information in the ordering and organization of a 2000 page text book. I would tend to say yes, although I look forward to seeing what the courts say.
Fighting this to the end could eat up a substantial amount of Venrock's $8M.