Expensive Books Inspire P2P Textbook Downloads

jyosim writes "A site called Textbook Torrents is among the many sites popping up offering free downloads of expensive textbooks using BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer networks. With the average cost of textbooks going up every year, and with some books costing more than $100, some experts say that piracy will only increase." Having just completed graduate school, I can attest that quite a few books are in that more-than-$100 range, and that they're heavy besides. But the big-name textbook publishers are much less interested than I am in open textbooks, even if MIT has demonstrated that open courseware is feasible, and Stanford and other schools have put quite a bit of material on iTunes.

Comments

Re:From Dirty thieves to Abondware = Freeware?

[monxrtr]

I'm just so trigger happy itching to see the legal court cases that smash the publishers of frequently changing textbook editions. If they refuse to sell older editions, there is a legitimate argumentative claim that they have abandoned the intellectual property claims of those older editions. If they are not actively trying to make a profit on older textbook editions, then you couldn't ask for a better caricature of a Scrooge to burn in effigy.

Textbook publishers are going to take some crushing public relations blows. This is going to expose vast swathes of the innards of the inherent contradictory structure of copyright law. It's utterly laughable to watch some academics advocate the forced artificial scarcity of knowledge. Maybe we will see some nice collateral damage occurring in some prestigious institutions of higher education, who by their tacit consent are violating their mission charters to advance knowledge. If they aren't careful, they will expose the very churn and burn business nature of the paper degree pushing Union Cards they are bestowing upon us peasantry.

These are exciting, exciting, almost Revolutionary, times! If copyright law is eliminated, humanity will be freed from the chains of artificial scarcity ignorance. The textbook account of the elimination of imaginary property is being written in our time. Hahaha. I just love it!