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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.
...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.
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.
Because there's not incentive for professors and other professionals to participate in the development of such. If you wanted it to happen, you'd make the professors' pay or tenure contingent on their contributing to the development of public-domain curriculum in their discipline.
I'm in my sophomore year of college, and I've already taken half a dozen classes requiring an $80 online pass.
Then I sure hope people have a "right" to remove any nonsensical DRM and use their own property in any way they wish. After someone has bought it from you, you're powerless (or should be, but remember, so-called "rights" can be given or taken away).
There are plenty of good, free and low-cost textbooks, and many professors use them.
But, given that students are willing to pay tens of thousands per year to go to college in the first place, a few hundreds dollars in books hardly make a big difference.
I know two professors, one in math, currently working on open source text books at my local college. I know the math prof is looking for a stable book (not reshuffling the order of the problems and calling it a new edition), the ability to correct errors (some of these books have had the same blatant errors for over a decade), the ability to customize for your curriculum (the regular publishers won't even fix obvious errors, so nobody expects them to listen to requests/suggestions), and a reasonable cost (whatever printing costs if you don't have a laptop or something since $120 for a math book loaded with errors is INSANE.)
There are plenty of free or open source textbooks listed if you search, and whether it's appropriate for your class depends on your requirements. Other than that, I can't say anything about the quality of all of them, only the half dozen I've reviewed which looked just fine, but the teachers hadn't gone through them yet.
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.
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
It has, the classroom method for instruction and knowledge is dead. It died when the internet came about. The thing is though, college is not about instruction it is about getting a piece of paper to get hired (or an experience).
Just about every single skill can be learned for free online. Want to know about British history? Identify Roman coins? Learn C#? You can find that for free online. Unless you have a degree though, chances are you aren't going to make it past the first round of screening HR does.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
Authors have a *right* to direct how their work is used.
Not content with the right to control sales, now they want you to prove you bought it
in order to take the class.
What happens when roommates decide to share the book? Will they let two students register
with the same book id number for the useless on-line material (which only exists to get your book ID number)?
I shared several books with a roomie in college, because we took the courses at different time of the day.
The hall book-handoff was a daily ritual. We split the price of the book, and resold it splitting the proceeds.
If this scheme locks out Book IDs that were used previously, what happens to the first sale doctrine?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yeah. Enforcing copyright laws is defined by restricting the dissemination of knowledge.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
At least according to the 9th Circuit in Vernor v. Autodesk, there is no first sale doctrine if the transaction includes a licensing agreement which substantially restricts (such as prohibiting subsequent transfer of the access license) the rights of the purchaser. All this, even if the transaction is treated as a straight-up sale in all other regards by both parties (full upfront payment with no obligation to return the material after a time, and no further obligations on the part of the seller).
As a result, any sale can be converted to a license simply by posting a licensing agreement which includes restrictive terms. This latter part is not idle speculation, but is actually specifically noted by the 9th Circuit order. Given that the 9th Circuit declined an en banc hearing on the results and SCOTUS declined certiorari, the ruling will stand unchallenged until the unlikely event that another Circuit issues an opposing ruling. Given that the US judiciary has evolved from ruling on function (looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck) over form (looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, appellant claims it's a cat, probably a cat), it's unlikely SCOTUS would reverse this ruling even if it somehow ends up in front of them though.
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
I agree. The 9th Circuit judges who heard the case I listed do not.
Specifically:
The Court tacitly agrees with the ALA's claims as to the potential effects of the ruling on other media should the licensing practices of the software industry be adopted by other distributors outside the software industry. Book sales are only different because the use of licensing has not been adopted. Without Congressional intervention, book and video sellers are free to adopt the conventions of software licensing and end secondary markets.
You are right, but then it would make sense that Universities, instead of costing the price of a family house, would transform to a professional social network, where individuals with different skills could organize different study groups, and academic reference would be the list of workgroups with their freely available, freely usable published results, depending on the field.
It is insane to see that while the cost of distributing information is rapidly falling, the costs of education is steadily growing.
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.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
You don't have to make tenure and promotion "contingent" upon developing public-domain materials. You can just encourage it by allowing such work to count toward tenure. Such work is very time-consuming, especially if you're doing it for some form of publication because you have to make sure you're not infringing and that the work is near enough to perfect that it doesn't make you or the institution look bad in some way. All too often preparation of teaching materials counts for little or nothing, and the publication of online or free stuff or self-published stuff isn't regarded as counting for much. Frankly it often doesn't; it's just too easy for a lazy person to "publish" some twaddle as they look for promotion. So, in addition to allowing this stuff to count toward t&p, you also need some editorial oversight, which means you need some institution to pay for the people who will be doing that work, even if that "pay" is just release time.