Boundless Settles Lawsuit with Three Major Publishers

Boundless Settles Lawsuit with Three Major Publishers

Dec 18, 2013

UNBOUND: Boundless, a Boston-based startup on a mission to create OER digital textbooks for introductory higher-ed courses, announced it reached a confidential settlement agreement on a lawsuit filed by Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Freeman & Worth Publishing Group for unfair competition, false advertising and copyright infringement.

Speaking with EdSurge, Boundless CEO and founder, Ariel Diaz, says the meat of the lawsuit centered around "the selection of facts and order in which they are presented" in the textbooks. There was "no wholesale copying of text," he affirms.

Diaz maintains the legal battle did not pose a burden for his team. "We worked with a really good law firm with experience in copyright issues," he says, and "the evidence that we were not distracted is in our product and customer expansion." In a blog post, Diaz outlines how Boundless has expanded to 21 subjects and reached over 3 million users since the lawsuit was filed. In December, the company launched an educator dashboard.

"The transition to a digital educational content foundation has been slowed by a conservative industry, a search for new business models, and a lack of great products. Thankfully, we're finally on the verge of solving this," he writes.

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