The Harvard Bookstore is claiming that it owns the ISBN numbers and that students writing them down is a violation of intellectual property rights.

Coop considers that information the Coop’s intellectual property.

A series of numbers?

I used to write down ISBN numbers in fifth grade thinking they were some kind of code... my teacher thought I was a weirdo and now I have come to the same conclusion.

constantskeptic - ROTFL

That's ridiculous! There's no way an ISBN number could be considered the intellectual property of this bookseller, since those numbers are assigned by a global database. They're not even proprietary to the publishers. I'm pretty sure that falls in the realm of being in the public domain. To claim otherwise makes as much sense as to say that a car's license plate number is the intellectual property of a used car lot.