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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.
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.
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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That's a very rosy view of the academe you have there. Let me guess, you went to an expensive university where the teachers' salaries are high enough that students' grades are non-"negotiable".
My cynical self says that is true, but I remember in the past people saying that Internet censorship was impossible. Now, it is commonplace.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a son-of-ACTA bill brewing, where it wouldn't just do encryption, but signatures, so if something detects an unencrypted item (music/book/video/program), it would shut the device down, phone home, and call the local popo on a "IP tampering" violation.
DRM is improving. It took a long time for the iPhone 4s to be jailbroken. It took almost five years for any type of action to crack the PS3. Blu-Ray is still a cat and mouse game.
With a law and reactive infrastructure in place that would not just disable devices that are tampered with (think XBL bans), but also accounts. Then add criminal penalties onto it, and it wouldn't be surprising to see something put into place that would be robust without any cracks.
Yes, in theory, having Bob and Charlie be the same person is wrong, but throw enough tamper-resistant hardware at the problem, and it will work, just like how deploying censorware has effectively worked.
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
They think we live in fairy land
I think they live in a fairy land. From the summary.
...enhancing the overarching academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge.
The idea that protecting copyright helps encourage the creation process is at least a valid idea. However I don't see any way that restricting the ability to copy that knowledge somehow helps disseminate it.
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.
Yeah. Enforcing copyright laws is defined by restricting the dissemination of knowledge.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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
The idea that protecting copyright helps encourage the creation process is at least a valid idea.
Maybe technically valid, but still completely wrong. For example if Terry Pratchett was not allowed to use public domain works as a basis for his own Discworld series, the Discworld books would either suck or not exist at all.
In the original sense of the word, forcing someone to give you their money is textbook piracy.
If internet porn has taught me anything, and it has, it's that you don't need money to negotiate grades with your college professor.
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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.
You assume proffessors are there to teach. Teaching is that annoying thing that gets in the way fo thier real job- research and publishing papers.
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.
Yeah, because that few bucks you get on a hundred dollar textbook is really worth alienating all your students. The money comes when the textbook is good enough to be adopted by other faculty at other institutions. And check this out: a professor might well write a book that he or she thinks is the best book for the class. There's also a very high incentive not to write a crappy book and look like a dumbass in front of all your colleagues.
Could you give more details on this? I haven't read his books, but based on what I've heard of the books, they parody (or take inspiration from) certain aspects of other author's books - including J.R.R. Tolkien. Wikipedia says that the Discworld books were published from 1983 until the present. J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" books were written between 1937 and 1949 and published in 1937, 1954, 1955. Presumably, they were (and still are) under copyright - which means they were not public domain when Terry Pratchett parodied them.
I've read the entire main series of Discworld books except Snuff and Raising Taxes and Pratchett really does parody a lot of older works, Shakespeare in particular, though I haven't found anything that would remind me of Tolkien. There are two Shakespeare parody books: Wyrd Sisters (combination of Macbeth and Hamlet, the first spoken line in Pratchett's book is verbatim first spoken line from Macbeth) and Lords and Ladies (I believe it's a parody of A Midsummer Night's Dream but I'm not completely sure). Shakespeare also appears as a character in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe where Discworld elves try to become rulers of our world by influencing Shakespeare while he writes A Midsummer Night's Dream. Smaller references to Shakespeare also appear throughout other books. Other parodies of older works are Eric (parody of Faust, even the book cover points that out), Witches Abroad (multiple fairy tales including Cinderella), Maskerade (parody of The Phantom of the Opera) and Carpe Jugulum (I think it's a parody of Stoker's Dracula but it might be a parody of vampire stories in general). A lot of Pratchett's books also parody history and current culture themes, for example: Pyramids (parody of ancient Egypt), Moving Pictures (early years of Hollywood), Small Gods (Catholic church during the time of inquisition), Soul Music (life of Elvis Presley), Interesting Times (invasion of Genghis Khan into China), Hogfather (parody of Christmas and Santa Claus), The Last Continent (parody of Australia), The Truth (invention of movable type printing press) and Unseen Academicals (parody of football/soccer and its fans).