Here is the question:
Showing ${\rm Aut}(Q_{2^n})\cong{\rm Hol}(\Bbb Z_{2^{n-1}})$ for $n>3$
I have asked many questions like it.
The copyright section of the book states:
This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher [. . .], except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis.
My view is that it is scholarly analysis; however, @markvs disagrees. See the comments of the linked question.
Please help :)
It is the opinion of the Math SE moderation team that this question does not represent a clear violation of copyright law as we understand it. If you believe that our judgement is in error, please use the "Contact" link at the bottom of the page to raise the issue with the Community Moderation team and/or SE staff.
Beware "Internet lawyering" in all of its forms. Having said that - and to be clear, I am not your attorney or giving you legal advice - I work in this area and can comment generally on what I have seen in the US.
In the US, a plaintiff asserting copyright infringement on the basis of a discussion of a single exercise in a math textbook (even if that discussion involves verbatim recitation of the statement of a problem) would be highly likely to lose, and very early in litigation. This isn't to say that a vexatious plaintiff could not cause a defendant to incur legal expenses in responding to the lawsuit. I just don't see how they would win the lawsuit. (Please note, in America, the default rule is that both sides pay their own attorneys' fees regardless of who wins. This is not the default in other jurisdictions.)
There are two main reasons for this. First, empirically speaking, factual matter - that is, content close to some kind of objective reality, where the form of how something is described might be partially dictated by bounds that are not subject to the whims of the writer - is not afforded broad protection in the US. Second, there is the doctrine of fair use.
None of this has anything to do with words that might be put by the publisher in the front of the book. I don't know of any case in which a court has found these types of recitations meaningful in assessing the boundaries of liability. It is certainly possible for somebody to become forbidden (e.g. by contract) to do something that they otherwise would have been able to do. In the US, the question of whether printed matter is effective to create legal obligations is a matter of state law, not federal law, and so can have 50 potentially different answers. But I have never seen boilerplate in the front of a textbook litigated. My guess is that I haven't seen it litigated because in most states such language would be regarded as meaningless.
I should add a few cautionary words. There is a lot of commentary about what is or is not US "fair use" as though there are settled rules in this area, and there mostly aren't. (The doctrine is codified in 17 USC 107, reflecting words largely drawn from an 1800s-era opinion by Joseph Story, but these words shed very little light on how the doctrine is applied in specific circumstances). In real life, if you get sued, you can be entirely right about US fair use but may have to spend quite a bit of money to prove it. Lawrence Lessig has described fair use as "the right to hire a lawyer," and he is not wrong about that. A lot of defendants who are not in the wrong find out that it can be cheaper to pay a settlement than it is to pay lawyers who can prove that they are right. (Some countries, not the United States, have formalized rule-bound doctrines that expressly place certain activities within a "safe" realm of non-actionable behavior. Fair use in the US is not like that - every defendant has to prove their own case.)
Despite this general indeterminacy, however, academic commentary on a math exercise is the absolute core of what the doctrine exists to protect. It isn't close. If someone asked me to file a lawsuit on that basis I would be concerned about the possibility of being sanctioned for doing so. (I would cite cases, but do not do so because I do not want this comment to resemble personalized legal advice, which it is not.)
So the broader question: what happens if we are talking not just one exercise, but a lot of exercises from the same book. In the US, it is very much within the rights of the owner of a copyright in a math textbook to use copyright claims to suppress the unauthorized distribution of a solution manual to that textbook. A plaintiff would argue that even if individual exercises exist in the realm of unprotectible "fact" (which is debatable), their selection and arrangement in a course of study is protectible expression. And there is an enormous amount of authority that a plaintiff could cite in support of that point. Unauthorized solutions manuals to copyrighted textbooks are extremely likely to be regarded as infringements of copyright. (Publishers who respond to this kind of thing with legal threats, which I have seen happen, are not just bluffing or attempting to intimidate. A cautious attorney would tell a client who wanted to distribute a full solutions manual without authorization not to do that.)
In the middle, we have the question of degree: what if someone's activity on a site includes, in bits and pieces and in various places, discussion that might in some aggregate sense resemble a solutions manual. There's no one answer. It depends! Much of what renders compilations of factual or near-factual matter copyrightable in the US (namely, originality in the form of selection and arrangement) are arguably absent from a discrete series of different questions. This is true even if some search function allows a site user to review all questions by a single user, or all posts about a specific textbook. That's what I'd argue on the defense side. I don't think such a case is a slam dunk for the plaintiff, and I would suspect the motives of anybody who said that it was. Having said that, I wouldn't want to defend such a case, either.
Here are my cents of wisdom on this matter (from mathematicians' perspective):
Your Role in Copyright Enforcement What do you do when someone claims an answer was copied illegally, or maybe a teacher is claiming that a student is posting test questions on your site? Here in the States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) tells us very specifically how to handle claims of copyright infringement.
Your role in enforcement
As moderators, you are not employees of Stack Exchange. In essence, you are free to moderate the site for content how you see fit. If you are ever notified about copyrighted material, and feel like taking it down, that’s cool… but you are not required to do so. You are not DMCA agents (we have those of our own). If you get a request for takedown, you can either remove the post OR point the person to the Copyright Policy linked below.
Here at Stack Exchange central, we have to be concerned about claims of copyright infringement that may not be valid. If WE (Stack Exchange Inc.) get notices to take down offending content, the claimants need to follow DMCA procedure and contact us with the correct form. It’s all outlined in the Terms Of Service:
“Reporting Copyright Infringements”
Our TOS covers all the relevant info about DMCA.The claimants will have to contact us with the necessary forms and information. That makes the issue pretty simple and straightforward on your end. Delete or reply with link.
In other words, "SE will deal with the problem if a complaint is filed."
As far as individual users go, I agree with markvs: It will be "Publisher vs SE", not "... vs user."
Exercises are a valuable part of a textbook. One consideration departments/instructors make when choosing a particular textbook is presence or absence of exercises. The presence of exercises makes it easier to teach a class using a book, since one can simply assign HW problems from the textbook. Choosing HW problems from the textbook also makes teaching more uniform across different academic years.
In view of this, each time a solution to an exercise from a textbook is posted online, the value of the book goes down a bit. At some point, once too many homework problems are solved online, the department or instructor can simply decide to use a different textbook. You may not care if a publisher looses the revenue in the process, but you may want to think about the author of the textbook.
If one is a fan, for instance, of Professor Derek Robinson and his book, one should (from my viewpoint) think seriously about harming his interests by making solutions of problems from his textbook available online.
