The lawsuit between textbook replacement startup Boundless and three major textbook publishers has at last been settled.
Boundless announced Wednesday morning that the company has reached a settlement with Pearson Education, Cengage Learning and Bedford and Freeman & Worth Publishing Group (owned by Macmillan Publishers). The aforementioned publishers filed a lawsuit against Boundless in March 2012, suing the startup on the claims of unfair competition, false advertising and copyright infringement.
Boundless Co-founder and CEO Ariel Diaz reflected on the lawsuit in a blog post Wednesday morning, championing the company's growth in the face of the publishers' pushback:
At the time of the lawsuit in March of 2012, our beta product was reaching a few thousand students, in three subjects with about 10 titles. Our product was a very basic web-only reader and our team had less than 10 people.
Since then, we have doubled the size of our amazing team, released two major student-facing products, built a brand new educator platform, grown our content sevenfold, and increased our usage and reach more than 3 million students and educators. This is not only incredibly exciting, it is also a testament to the strength of our team and vision.
Amidst the contentious lawsuit, Boundless prevailed, raising an $8 million Series A round in April 2012 led by Venrock and the company's other existing investors NextView Ventures, Founder Collective, Kepha Partners and SV Angel, who collectively put in $1.7 million in 2011.
Nearly a year into the case, Boundless called upon the judge to make a declaratory ruling regarding the legality of its current product. At the time, the company claimed the lawsuit largely revolved around the beta version of the product, which, even then, had long since been iterated on and updated.
In May, the company entered mediation with the publishers. And now, over a year and a half later, the lawsuit has been resolved through a confidential settlement agreement and a consent judgement.
Below is a statement from the official agreement:
In agreeing to a confidential settlement agreement, along with a public judgment and injunction entered by the Court, the parties have resolved the dispute. The resolution allows the parties to move forward and focus on their mutually shared goal of helping students learn. Boundless now has a clear path for building and marketing its OER-driven textbook alternatives without treading upon the Plaintiffs’ rights, and it is confident that it is in compliance and will not have further legal issues with the Plaintiff publishers. In turn, Plaintiffs have reinforced the strong protection they have in and to their copyrighted works and the related goodwill that they and their authors have established, and look forward to Boundless operating its business within the agreed upon framework.
With the dust settling on this industry drama, the startup will be able to shift attention back to its disruptive products. That being said, the suit hasn't been slowing them down. The company recently unveiled a customizable teaching platform to allow teachers to customize and curate their classes' textbook content.
