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Patent Granted on Mandatory Digital Keys to Prevent Textbook Piracy
First time accepted submitter discussM tipped us to a story about a recently granted patent in which "a system and method preventing unauthorized access to copyrighted academic texts is provided in which trademark licenses, discussion boards, and grade content are integrated into a web-based system that aligns the interests of teaching professionals, students, and publishers while also enhancing the overarching academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge." Quoting Torrent Freak: "As part of a course, students will have to participate in a web-based discussion board, an activity which counts towards their final grade. To gain access to the board students need a special code, which they get by buying the associated textbook." But don't worry too much, from Ars: "Beyond the legal questions, other experts suggested forcing students to buy texts through such a system is unlikely to be implemented. Professors have few incentives to make it more difficult and to compel students even more than they already are to buy textbooks, digital or analog. (A 2011 survey from UC Riverside found that 78 percent of undergraduates 'bought fewer books, bought cheaper books or read books on reserve to help meet expenses.')"
They ought to ask how many professors bought all the textbooks they required as students, and never used photocopies.
Knowledge is power, hide it well.
How come good free curriculum hasn't emerged? There are a few free curriculum projects out there, but they tend to have low quality, incompatible formats, and make it difficult for people to contribute.
More DRM nonsense. Stop being so paranoid about piracy that you hurt your own customers.
...Free and Open textbooks for all their courses.
School is PURELY a financial transaction, but schools want to fuck their customers good and hard. (I found working in a community college highly educational.) They want to make programs fit available funding, and Pell Grant farming is standard.
The profits made on books are calculated as part of the profit of each program. They are NOT provided by the school book store as a convenience, unless you consider anal rape convenient.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Whatever happened to just charging a fee for attending the course?
Stop trying to make extra money through textbook "upsells". Be upfront and honest by charging the book fee as part of the upfront course fees and give each student a copy.
Of the 40+ textbooks I was told were required throughout my undergrad years I bought about 4 used, 1 new, rented 2, and never bothered with the rest. I had a 3.5 gpa average by actually attending class each day. It cost over $110,000 for 4 years of out of state tuition, IMHO books should come with that. $0.02
Two basic facts:
(1) Bits cannot be made uncopyable. If you can read it, then you can copy it. No fancy patented scheme can prevent that. There are no exceptions.
(2) If encryption is used for this, then that means that encryption technology is being misapplied. If you give both the message and the key to the untrusted party, then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what encryption is used for.
For many of the courses I did we were told that certain books were good to read if you wanted to know more about the topic, but that the course could be completed with just the slides.
In other cases we got copies of the book because it had been out of print for 15 years.
Some courses didn't even bother with books and everything was just the slides and old exams.
I think only bought 2 books for school that I still check from time to time, and around 5 or so that I used extensively for the course itself.
Generally I think that after the first year most people only bought the books if it turned out the course was impossible to follow without it after several lectures.
This seems unlikely to gain traction in educational institutions for a number of reasons. At UCSD, most of the professors I've encountered are just as interested as the students in keeping cost of materials down. Most professors post the full text of the problem sets on class websites, so that they are independent of which edition of a textbook (if any) students purchase. Some professors state that the textbook is recommended, but not required, as their lectures are self-contained.
North Georgia college in Dahlonega is already doing it!! My daughter had to buy a specific text book, with an access code, for her online medical terminology course this summer...
Not surprisingly, Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party, says he's also against such a system.
"The notion that academics go to lengths to prevent the spread of knowledge comes close to sacrilegious," he wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "In particular, it is a complete conflict of interest between the profits of old-guard publishers and the real mission of academia—to spread knowledge as widely as possible."
The high cost of education in general prevents the "wide spread of knowledge" as well.
...Free and Open textbooks for all their courses.
This is exactly what OpenStax College Physics is providing: a popular but out of print textbook that was picked up by a couple of charitable organization (incl. Bill & Melinda Gates, I admit) and republished under a Creative Commons license. I will teach 170 pre-med students from this 'textbook' in the fall.
I do disagree vehemently with the rest of your comment!
I'm in my sophomore year of college, and I've already taken half a dozen classes requiring an $80 online pass.
...to make it more difficult and to compel students even more than they already are to buy textbooks"
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Oh God... he was serious, wasn't he?
Uh, for the record, my bro's French text was a) useless and b) written by the department head. A copy was ordered for each and every student, and they sat in the bookstore all year until the teacher was advised that no one would receive their grades until they were gone because, hey, how could anyone have gotten through the coursework w/o the textbook? Right?
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Anant Agarwal recently reported that at the course MIT 6.002 where textbooks are freely available for students, the textbook sales have gone through the roof. Publishers currently learn from such cases. This patent is complete nonsense. No teacher would make financial payments linked to grades.
Because I suggested something very similar to CMP when Dr Dobbs was failing in slow motion: codes with the magazine to gain access to online resources.
In both of my statistics and all three accounting classes (at two different universities) I had to purchase a bundle that comes with the "access code" for graded assignments. I know the accounting variety was called WileyPlus. This is old news.
One of the reasons textbooks are largely reviled in academia is their ability to turn students off, drain their wallet and misinform (in some instances) all at the same time.
If the textbook industry implodes, I think celebration is in order. The quality and cost of education would likely improve.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Ok, so textbooks have DRM now, and education takes place in an MMO
style arena. So where are the cheat codes? Har. Anyway it's a format most kids
relate to.
"Hey you, stop texting in class!"
All that illegal learning kids are doing these days. How dare they steal all of that information you own that someone else discovered!
It sounds like webassign (for math and physics). You have to buy a key to get access to the website which has your homework. Everyone has the same structured problems, but all the numbers are different. Grading is done instantly when you submit your answer. Students hate it and I would loudly and actively refuse any such system that expanded on it.
But I also don't understand how linking some software components is an invention.
There's not a single professor I know that would go for this. Especially the "web discussion" part being graded. It seems like a backdoor for publishers to try to co-opt or even replace the professors over time. "Don't hire a professor, sign a contract with us, we'll provide textbooks, grades, tests, the works, all you'll have to do is admin the system on your end."
"Cloud Classrooms", if you will.
Several professors do like the WebAssign style online homework systems, but only because TAs are at a premium in my area.
Fortunately them patenting it means that in effect it will kill the chances of it being used en mass.
They do have a reason; kickbacks.
1/2 the processors wrote the damned text book, so they have a vested interest in making student buy copies.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I hated this, and only encountered it once, in my Econ 102 class. We had to "buy" the online pass to view the online "textbook", which was really just a document wrapped in a flash applet, with "interactive" homeworks, that expired after 6 months. I asked the professor if he had another alternative, but he said I could always drop the class. Thankfully that was the only class I had to do that for.
Most other professors, especially within engineering were more than helpful with either giving out the ISBN so we didn't have to go through the bookstore, or in graduate school, had their own notes for the class, so a book wasn't even necessary. One class we were assigned two books that were available as PDFs from the authors, intentionally to be given away, which the professor pointed out. Thankfully in my engineering classes the professors have been helpful about allowing older editions of books or having a low cost alternative such as a compilation of notes. In my general education classes is where I've always encountered the incredibly expensive books that absolutely had to be the latest edition. I think it says something that the engineering books tended to hold up their value more than the books for those other classes, where a $130 english book ended up going back to the bookstore for $1.30. The engineering books were usually worth keeping too, once you got past the intro courses.
Oh, and the point I came here to make: Having a patent on an idea doesn't make it a good one.
I just finished 15 years of teaching at a state community & technical college and in the computer field we are shifting away from printed books to on-line material that is less expensive but does require an access code. The access code is good for three years which should be fine because by that time, a lot of the technical material will be out of date, obsolete, and archived somewhere on the web.
We are doing this for two reasons: Less cost for the student and more on-line availability. The platform provides video, audio, and printed material that is tied to industry standard curricula as well as kept up to date with most applicable certification tests. It was getting tough to find reasonably priced text books, even on-line, that taught that stuff currently being tested by CompTIA, Cisco, Microsoft, etc...
Our students currently desire more on-line material. This enables them to make more efficient use of their time in today's networked world. It also allows us to reduce the "seat time" in some courses, freeing up scarce hardware-oriented labs for more hands-on learning. For a four credit course instead of sitting for four hours a week, they sit for maybe two hours a week and spend two hours working on practical applications with an instructor in a lab. They make up the other two hours per week of "lecture" time by going through the on-line stuff.
On the other hand, at the four-year state university in the same town, many professors are not going this route because they wrote the text books that they "recommend" students purchase for their courses. Being a state school, they are not allowed to require their own products, but students all know that if they want to find the material that will be covered in quizzes, tests, etc... they had better buy the prof's book. With all the work that it takes to put a course on-line, I doubt if these old geezers will go that route anytime soon.
If I can find material that covers all three main learning styles (watching/listening/reading) consistently and for a reasonable price, why reinvent the wheel or write a new textbook? The package we are currently using runs about $90, or $30 per year of use. Not too bad...
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yeah; that'd be it...
Speaking as a professor in engineering, we care about learning. The books chosen for a course are ones we think are best for that course. Unfortunately they are expensive. Professors who write books get paid very little (except maybe unless the book sells many many many copies) but the bookstores and publishers are the ones that make all the money. We would love to have *good* free online books but so far there have not been any in my field that are even worth trying to use. We also care about the cost to students but as there are few good book choices we are pretty much stuck with the available ones, despite the high price.
I know that textbooks were selling(shrink wrapped, of course, with some sort of clickwrap EULA sticker) with a code printed inside that granted limited-term access to some sort of online component when I was in undergrad. And that was a vexing number of years ago. Thankfully, none of the professors actually bothered with the enforcement side of that bullshit; but the groundwork was all there and ready to go. Never mind the, less academic but no less trivially equivalent, emerging practice of selling crippled games along with various 'unlock codes' to deter the used game market.
Not only as this 'invention' in the worst spirit of trampling-on-right-of-first-sale scumsucking, it isn't even remotely novel...
What do you mean by Pell Grant farming?
then the lectures and any visuals they provide should be plenty.
why do you need the books in the first place? you are there to teach, not be a bridge between student and publisher. your lectures and any visuals you provide ought to be the only thing needed. is the system that broken?
As if we believe in the fairy tale that someone has gone all the troubles (and the associated costs) to file a patent RESTRICTING access to specific academic texts to only those who are authorized that THEY WON'T CHARGE ANYTHING ??
They think we live in fairy land
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"a system and method ... that aligns the interests of teaching professionals, [strike]students,[/strike] and publishers"
FTFY.
Ah, at last, the future is now.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Students can get up to $5500 per year in government aid depending on their need that they do not have to pay back. The government also backs loans at much lower interest rates available elsewhere. Once virtually everyone has access to large amounts of money for college, colleges can easily raise their rate and still have a large volume of students attending - and this is seen by the fact that almost every college raises their tuition and fees far in excess of the rate of inflation every year. Colleges practically bleed money, and very few of them have any semblance of balanced accounting.
the government [...] seems to be heavily controlled by the copyright cartels. How the hell did we let these people get this much money and power?
Getting elected to U.S. federal office requires the cooperation of the national news media. The national news media have become co-owned by the movie studios. Therefore, the movie studios get to frame the discussion any way they want.
This seems typical of the world of publishing today. Many publishers are merely money making machines, with little regard for either students, or knowledge. Unfortunately, as publishers adopt more and more predatory practices, they end up pissing off both students and professors. There is one major academic publisher in my field Cengage (who operate under many other names), whose books I now refuse to use. They update editions every three years, doing little more than changing page numbers and changing the order of exercises. Each new edition comes with a substantial price hike and force me to rework sections of my classes. The result of this? I now have the equivalent of an on-line text I have developed myself over the years. So, they have lost the business.
It is the very same publishing houses who are mean about sending us desk copies and charge us for them, if we do not adopt their texts. Again, they end up as losers, as there is no incentive to use their texts. They also get pissy when we sell the books that they send to us, without our asking. This again is silly. In the State in which I teach, professors have not had a pay rise in four years, so a few bucks to buy lunch was a welcome perk. Stopping this perk does not make us like them any more.
That being said, not all publishers are like this. Some keep their editions for a long time and do not change much when they bring out new editions. A good example of this is Oxford University Press. So, when I need to use a text for a class, all the business goes to OUP. This is the correct way to do business in publishing. It should not be about quarterly results, but rather about building and maintaining long term relationships. The technological innovation described in the post is just yet another step in the wrong direction. Eventually though, publishers will have to work out the errors of their ways, or perish./p
A) a system and method preventing unauthorized access to copyrighted academic texts
B) while also enhancing the overarching academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge
So they are trying to spread knowledge, by not allowing access to knowledge?
I believe one, if not both, of those things does not mean what they think it means.
rm -f `grep "system and method" `find /media/patents``
a highly educated workforce trumps any short term profits greed book makers can make. The fact that many subjects like Calculus have not changed in a very long time should make them at cost for printing the material. If book makers are not willing to do this then maybe the government should, it is in the countries interest.
ROFL
Oh. You were serious.
Since patents are used to limit the number of people who can do something, having a patent on something stupid will lead to limitations on the number of people doing said stupid thing.
The alternative is said stupid thing being a freely available technique that can be implemented at any time by anyone at no cost.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Anyone who has used Clifton's Strengths Finder knows that each book has a unique code in it that ties to an account on the Strengths Finder web site. What nobody has mentioned yet is that this also kills the second hand textbook market - the codes are useless to subsequent purchasers.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This has already been going on in Canada for years.
The last time I was in college, almost all of my courses required a textbook with one of these codes. You did have the option to buy the codes separately, but the codes alone cost $50-100.
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
I hope the patent is really broad, so that everytime a professor requires buying a textbook for a course they risk being slapped with a patent suit.
This is what we used to do to beat these greedy book publishers. Four or five of us would pool the money required to buy one copy of the book and tear it into that many pieces on the very first day. Hey, we are learning Computer Science and why not practice that parallel processing?
Professors have few incentives [...]
Until the book is written by that particular professor, who then requires its purchase in order to pass the class the professor is teaching.
Happens all the time in US universities, so in some cases there is a financial incentive for the professor to require the purchase of a particular book.
One the one hand, this is now a thing, and that sucks, hard. On the other, now it's patented, which means that, hopefully, only a handful of books will have this.
Not that I'm otherwise a huge fan of RMS, but I'm surprised I haven't seen any reference to the "Right to Read" in this discussion yet. Given the direction US copyright and education are going, it gets scarily closer every day.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
why is it the a C/C++ book cost a mere $3 in India - while the same C/C++ book cost over $41 in US ?
I bet to you that same C/C++ book cost around $3 in China too!!
In the original sense of the word, forcing someone to give you their money is textbook piracy.
There are plenty of good, free and low-cost textbooks, and many professors use them.
I really love club dresses ,
Schools have failed, It's that simple.
They don't teach the Constitution, or the DHS wouldn't exist.
They teach socialist UN agenda 21 globalist political science (as opposed to real science which actually include the SUN, Aerial Spraying and HAARP technology)
They don't teach math, or the banksters would be in jail
Colleges and their student loans should be charged with racketeering.
At some point you start your own school, and let these fucked up schools take a dirt nap.
No school is better than the shit we have now
Maybe make textbooks cost less than what a student can pay for food over two months and they'll start buying more of them.
In my first year as an undergraduate in South Africa (where fees are probably fairly cheap compared to the rest of the world) I paid approximately $1000 for the year. I needed to buy 7 books overall, costing a total of approximately $350 (bought new). This was in 1997. All the books were imported and the prices based mostly on the US price, plus the usual healthy markup and taxes. So, yes! It makes a bloody difference. One book was more than a month's rent for me. The developing world sure could use some free text-books, and quite frankly, the developing world should take the lead here too. There are some excellent professor's who develop world class text books teaching at universities in the third world. third world governments should be subsidizing THEM to write these materials, as it will save on education costs in the long run.
I don't know where you worked, but your statement doesn't reflect my years of experience teaching at four different universities and one community college. Every higher-ed institution I've worked at, attended, or considered as an employer had a bookstore that was run by an external vendor. The money from the books doesn't go back to the institution. There is sometimes a sort of kickback deal where a percentage of sales will go back to a specific department. I and many other _professors_ consider that shady, and we don't like it, but it's often thrust upon us. At my current institution we just got out of a contract that had such a provision, and we're glad to be out of it. The sort of publisher who needs to offer you kickbacks is not the type providing a good product. By the way, we used the kickbacks to buy photocopier paper and some computers for the honors students' program; we didn't otherwise have the funding. On the issue of "Pell Grant farming" and programs fitting available funding, hell yes that's happening. What do you want to do? Pay higher tuition instead? Every school I've worked at in the last few years has been shedding instructional faculty because we don't have money. Enrollments are up, demands on us for tech, parking, new buildings, entertainment in the dorms, those are all up. But state and federal funding has dropped steadily for 30 years. Our endowments and investments tanked in the "great recession." So where are we going to turn? We'll jack up tuition as much as we can without cutting enrollments, and we'll "farm" what little public money is left.
In the United States, at public institutions, students are not paying customers, really. That's because, even after 30 years of cuts in public funding for education, the education at public universities and colleges is still mostly paid by the taxpayer. That's changing, slowly. Soon we'll be back to the good old days when only the wealthy can afford to pay or risk the crushing loan debt. Keep voting for "fiscal conservatives" so that we can more swiftly reach that new Gilded Age.
The only hope is that this ends up like a professor at the U of M --
He wrote his own book and students had to either print it off themselves at home or take it somewhere to have it printed for $6.
It was 100% relivant to the class so no wasted book or money. Beats paying $150 for a book 80% of classes dont use.
From the perspective of government, a highly educated workforce is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can lead to a stronger economy and higher tax revenue, but on the other hand, a highly educated workforce is harder to control.
They should simply increase the course cost and provide all text books for free. They can't push the cost up too high because they want students. Then the struggle over the budget will be between more appropriate parties and perhaps prof. Greedy's new book won't be included because it's not cost-effective.
Many professors in universities, especially major research universities, do not necessarily have a say in what textbook they can get. In fact, there are very little choices as there are only three major publishers out there that provide senior-level text books. The decision on which textbook to use is made by the college board members as well as the professor.
The textbook industry is very lucrative. It's like pharmaceutical companies, they have sellers going around pushing the text book, etc.
I've taken sophomore level courses whose textbook required online activation to have access to the questions (online) that the professor assigns homework from. It was messed up, because there was an online version of the textbook and physical copy. The online copy was $250 and it came with the activation code. Whereas, the physical copy, if bought from the college bookstore, was also $250, but you had to pay $60 for the activation code as the copies sold to the school from the publisher did not have them - and they wouldn't get the newer versions of the book until next semester... It pissed a lot of students off as it was a 100 student Physics II course.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
This is battle.net for textbooks, how is this patentable?
At the moment I've been taking 3-4 classes as part of distance education online (which the college is horrible at). In the 4 semesters I've had so far I've had 5 courses that required a access code, or the book (usually it was cheaper for me to buy used, and then by the access code directly from the publisher).
I buy textbooks from Amazon when they are cheaper than the university approved bookstore.mbsdirect.net Oh the unhumanity I've caused! Sometimes MBS is cheaper though, and sometimes they have self-published things that can't be had anywhere else. But fir the most part, Amazon is cheaper. And it's not (yet) illegal to buy books from them.
According to the NCES, inflation has been most marked and correlated to Pell Grant availability within the for profit, private schools. Public colleges and private, not for profit schools show lower increases and less correlation.
The canard that school loans cause tuition increases is another right-wing canard, true mainly because the for-profits are skewing the numbers. As usual, it is another right-wing smoke-and-mirrors assertion, where the right's solution (the free enterprise, for-profit colleges) actually cause or exacerbate the problem.
That is all.
shoulda got a lawyer. Because if it's one thing a bunch of broke college kids have it's money to hire a lawyer. :P
Even if a rich kid had hired one out of spite, it's still 'required course work'. Buyer beware, and all that rot.
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I live right down the street from the main entrance of UC Riverside, where the mentioned study was done. Based on what's going on in my neighborhood, and occasional discussions with students, undergrads at UC Riverside are mostly upper-middle class (and higher) Chinese kids. If 78% of them can't afford texbooks, higher education is in real trouble.
This patent seems to me to protect the IP rights on a product that simply makes life unnecessarily more costly and difficult for a generation of already-cash-strapped students. Is it not enough that, due to an exponential rise in tuition, increased costs, and global recession, most students in the US are lucky to be able to attend school at all, much less purchase books that they might not even need? Moreover, potentially putting this demographic on the hook for IP infringement simply does not seem justifiable.