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Information Preservation and Data Havens?
tiltowait asks: "An interesting story on LISNews.com this morning about savvy U.S. students photocopying textbooks in Mexico then returning them for refunds got me thinking about data havens. There's already few places on the web where you can exploit countries having different copyright durations and eligibility. On the flip side, there's restrictions such as broadcast blackouts and country-wide firewalls. But just as the rich can use of international tax loopholes and in light of the recent file-sharing victory, are there any projects out there, beyond the P2P networks, to distribute possibly-protected information by any means necessary? For example, your company may already outsource labor, but what about an off-site backup in case of an FBI raid?"
All of the bookstores at my school which are authorized by the professors to sell designated textbooks (What class are you in? Oh, okay. Here are these books) will not let you return the book unless you show proof that you are dropping that class. Otherwise, I assume that many people would've simply done the "drop the book at a copy shop and return it later" method.
I don't think the solution to the "text book problem" is violating copyrights. I think the solution in the long run will be to do more open source text books. I understand some professors make money writing text books, but I think others would be very interested in using open source text books, perhaps developed wiki style. You could use processes like Cafe Press's publishing to get deadwood versions, but otherwise, having an annotatable, searchable text book that you can load onto a PDA or a laptop would be really useful, in my opinion. I think my teachers would have definitely been open to the idea of open source text books, provided the content was as good as anything you have to pay $100+. But as some posters pointed out, certain fields don't exactly change a lot over the years. And heck, even the ones that do are perfectly suited to the idea of an open source e-text. All it's going to take is some willing people and a decent grant.
Most copy shops (Kinko's comes to mind) will refuse to copy any copyrighted material, and that includes any book.