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New Bill Proposes Open Source Requirement for Publicly Funded Books
fsufitch writes "On September 30th, the 'Open College Textbook Act of 2009' was introduced to the Senate and referred to committee. The bill proposes that all educational materials published or produced using federal funds need to be published under open licenses. The reasoning behind it takes into account the changing way information is distributed because of the Internet, the high price of college and textbooks, and the dangerously low college graduation rates in the US. Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?"
If the public pays for the research and creation they should have access to the intellectual product for no additional fee. It's silly that it isn't this way now. Of course we can all thank our corrupt congress critters for that.
Yep. That's why it'll never pass - expect large amounts of money to flow into key campaign coffers to put an end to this nonsense before it gets started. At some point we need to have congressmen who aren't bought and paid for by special interests.
By the way - for those of you who say "yeah, but this open source stuff is a special interest, too", no, it isn't. It's a *general interest*. It benefits everybody but a select few, rather than benefiting a select few at the expense of everybody else.
Do you have ESP?
Basic K-12 and Undergrad materials and course work do not change that much. Why shouldn't there be open source materials available? If they are publicly funded in any way, it should have been a requirement long ago. I for one used to refuse to sell my books back to the store for pennies on the dollar. It was always better to keep them or give to another student. With open source, more people could afford to go to university.
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?
If you accept public money, you have to accept public obligations. I'd have no sympathy for a publisher that received federal funding but disliked the conditions put on it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?
And if it does, then what?
It's not the government's job to protect particular business models or industries from technological innovation. It's also not particularly the government's job, in my opinion, to go out of its way to give money to private companies without a compelling public interest. Even before open source licenses were commonplace, I would have argued that any intellectual property generated with public funds should automatically be put into the public domain. Making it open source is a possible alternative, but if materials are generated with my tax dollars, I shouldn't generally have to pay again to use them.
The reasoning behind it takes into account the changing way information is distributed because of the Internet, the high price of college and textbooks, and the dangerously low college graduation rates in the US
The fraction of the population that has gone to college had been steadily increasing over the last 50 years. One major result of that is that what constitutes a college education has in many ways been reduced. There are good and bad arguments about what has happened with college education over the last few years but there's no plausible way to describe the college graduation rate as dangerously low unless one thinks that a priori everyone should graduate college like everyone should graduate high school. That's not an easy case to make.
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?
We can only hope it will kill the publishers, the way they've been killing US college kids for years. Do you think college kids would eat such a steady diet of ramen noodles if they weren't spending all their money on textbooks? Have you ever compared the cost of textbooks in the US to the SAME books overseas? Take a look at amazon.co.uk sometime and compare a textbook there to the same book in the US. The only difference is likely that one says "international version" on the cover. Oh, and it'll be less than half the price.
No, a bill such as this won't endanger publishing companies... publishing companies have endangered themselves by pissing off their customers with insanely high pricing. Maybe something like this would finally bring competition to the textbook industry and help make school a little more affordable.
Seems to me that anything - books, medical procedures and devices, pharmaceuticals, etc. - belong to the public and we should not have to pay for them...
... wouldn't their advanced education put the few and far between college grads at the forefront of our already-too-tight job market? (I better hit "submit" before my boss catches me and I lose my minimum-wage temp job.)
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Copyright was intended to "encourage the arts" not grant special rights to publishers over works that were funded by the public. All publicly funded information should be in the public domain. If publishers don't like it then boo hoo. The only reason they even get copyright rights in the first place is that we, the public, gave them those rights and we are very well within our power to take them away for works that we funded.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
This is a laudable notion, but it has a huge loophole: how do we determine that the time an author spent working on a book was funded by the government? Consider a university scientist on an NSF grant. Such a scientist is typically paid salary off the grant for two months per year, with nine months paid in university salary, and one month not at all. The scientist files grant progress reports every year indicating what she did with the grant money, aside from surfing porn. If she doesn't want to open-source a book, she simply doesn't claim it as a grant-related activity, and instead publishes it for-profit and keeps the royalties.
I suspect that this will only result in academic books being open-sourced which were already published at a loss, for example by university presses. Anything likely to make a substantial profit will still be closed source.
I noticed a pattern here with Congress.
Step One. Propose a law that would hurt an industry.
Step Two. Receive large campaign donations to stop that law.
Step Three. ???
Step Four. Re-election!
Whoa -- not so fast. The government usually pays for fundamental research, and when it does the public should be able to freely use the fruits of the research. This means the right to read the research papers, see the data, and use any resulting inventions (i.e. practice resulting patents). However, getting from the fundamental research to the actual product usually requires more investment that is not government-funded -- and unless we make it possible for the people who put up the capital for this stage to profit they will not invest.
For a hypothetical, assume that NIH-funded doctors discover that a particular plant extract improves survival rates from heart disease. They should have to make their research article freely available to the public (probably after a year's delay allowing research journals to profit -- this is to fund the refereeing system). They should also have to make their data available to the public so we can check the results. Note however, that knowing that the extract is useful is not the same as having a life-saving drug. Someone has to come up with an industrial process to manufacture the drug, establish appropriate dosages and safety levels and so on. Every drug company (they are members of the public too!) should be able to now use this publicly available knowledge to try make a drug. If they succeed we should give them patent protection for a while so they can recover the investment in their part of the work. Other drug companies should be able to use the public knowledge too, as long as they invent new drugs.
Hey all,
Just remember, saying you're all for it on an internet forum doesn't actually do anything... Write your elected officials in support of S.1714, the "Open College Textbook Act of 2009". Here are some links, just in case you're THAT lazy....
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
http://takeaction.lwv.org/lwv/dbq/officials/
Remember to get the senate AND the house.
-T
Who wants to bet that the publisher's lobby is going to have this bill killed?
I thought the EU parliament operated exactly the same as Congress - direct election of the man (or woman) you want to represent your district.
Each EU country can choose among systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_elections#Voting_system
Almost all use variants on the crappy list system, where you vote for a party, and the party list is usually headed by a bunch of sleazy vampires who would be unelectable as individuals. The list system also results in a really weak link between voters and the elected elite. Arguably, it's as bad as the first-past-the-post system used in US congressional elections and UK parliamentary elections - gerrymandering is no longer needed, being replaced by list precedence, which is determined by internal party machinations. In EU elections, Ireland and Northern Ireland use the much better transferrable vote system, which gives almost as proportional result as the list system, but keeps a strong link between voters and their elected representatives, all of whom are elected as individuals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Transferable_Vote
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'll borrow the top half of your line.
College is hard because not everyone can master the material. What's terrible is the "low$" degrees help subsidize everything else. A lecture class = 2 books, 42 lectures, and "the right to pick the prof's brain for 42 questions per semester". (Much more than that gets you frowned at!) Then this is proven by an evaluation of four papers and three exams. So Hitchiker aside, a college class should cost $250 tops. The entire degree would come in at $8000 + $2000 misc = $10,000.
Education is going to crash in the next wave as soon as we quit distracting ourselves in our current topics.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Then there's no reason not to support the bill. But more along the lines of your undefended assertion: What's your evidence? I need to see what figures you use to arrive at the conclusion quoted above.
As a matter of principle, I don't see why I should care if people seek other funding sources. As a matter of fact, I find it hard to believe that there will be no takers for public money conditioned on releasing in a manner in line with public use. After all, if we taxpayers paid for the book we should collectively own that work and that means releasing that work to us all under terms that allow sharing, modification, and distribution without royalty. Many government publications already come to us this way and people seem to be okay with continuing to write them.
So? And there's nothing that says one won't be paid to write such books. Just that one won't retain copyright to said book and be able to control its distribution for as long as copyright allows.
Digital Citizen
Ron Paul certainly has done nothing to show that he knows better than everyone else.
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr091003.htm
Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government's interference in the housing market, the government's policy of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing. - Ron Paul September 10, 2003
Because they've done the study.
The study that made them incapable of predicting the crash or understanding the causes? Yeah, I'll get right on that.
Because now you're just looking like an idiot.
Maybe so, but I'm an idiot whose wealth didn't get wiped out. It grieves me to see so many otherwise intelligent people following the expertise of the very people who have just screwed them over. Maybe they should become idiots. If I'm an idiot, at least I'm a lucky idiot.
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