[skissane]

> For the tables there's very little transformation, and a huge chunk of verbatim text.

IANAL either–but how is the copyright owner (MIT presumably) harmed by the reproduction of these course descriptions? It isn't like they harm the commercial value of the courses in any way; the course is the actual product here, the description is just sales and marketing collateral, and has minimal value apart from the product it is selling.

Furthermore, given the fact the paper was coauthored by MIT employees – arXiv could argue that MIT (through its employees acting as its agents) had granted them an implied license to reproduce it. Which is the other issue – even if this isn't fair use, MIT may have agreed to license it through its agents. You can still be bound by the actions of your employees, even if those actions violated your own internal policies–especially in dealings with third parties who had no reason to suspect there was any such violation.

> I don't see how there is any gain versus just publishing the course numbers and titles.

"Algebra I" and "Algebra II" don't mean much – what topics do they actually cover? A one sentence/paragraph course description adds a lot, because they tell you what topics are actually covered. Yes, someone could probably look it up on the MIT website – but it saves the reader a lot of effort doing that. Especially if someone is reading this 20 years from now, by which time the content of MIT courses may have changed a lot (despite having the same title), and finding what their content was 20 years ago may require a lot of research effort (if the reader even thinks to do that).

> Publication of the (possibly) previously unpublished copyrighted work in figure 4 fully and completely destroys its value

Figure 4 is likely not the "work", rather a small quote from a much larger work. How does a small quote from a work (even if allegedly unpublished) "fully and completely destroys its value"?

[anonymouskimmer]

Re: the course descriptions. Yes, I can see a judge buying that defense. And yes, we don't know what license to use exists for MIT faculty. I could also see a judge buying that the research article here doesn't need to publish the course descriptions in order to make its point at all.

> IANAL either, but figure 4 is likely not the "work", rather a small quote from a much larger work. How does a small quote from a work (even if allegedly unpublished) "fully and completely destroys its value"?

Exams are often composites of multiple independent works. Said exams being recomposited periodically (i.e. using a database of questions to create an exam). The argument here is that the individual question is itself a complete work (equivalent to an independent chapter in a book of works on a topic). And here it is not just on its lonesome, but with its answer, too.

[skissane]

> Exams are often composites of multiple independent works.

If figure 4 came from an exam. For all we know, figure 4 actually came from course notes, assignments, etc. Whether or not issuing those to students counts as "publication", they are easily available to future students in a way that past exam questions are often not, hence their publication does far less damage to their value.

Also, MIT says that "Iddo did not have permission from all the instructors" – for all we know, figure 4 is from one of those instructors for which he did have that permission.

[anonymouskimmer]

Yep, those sorts of possibilities is what the "(possibly)" in my earlier post was for.

Based on a quick search it seems the figure 4 question and answer have to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_decision_process , which seem to be used in computer science. Iddo Drori is an associate professor of CS, so it seems quite likely it's his own question.