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Latvian Police Raid Teacher's Home for Uploading $4.00 Textbook
richlv writes "Latvian police recently raided the home of a history teacher and confiscated his computer. The crime? Scanning a history book and making it available on his website covering various topics on history. The raid was based on a complaint from the publisher (Google Translate to English), which has a near-monopoly on educational materials in Latvia, often linked with shady connections in the Ministry of Education."
and in the us the same book will be $200-$400 updated 1-2 times a year.
textbook publishers use all kinds of BS to keep there monopoly on educational materials in place.
Doesn't seem like fair use.. seems like blatant copyright infringement. As I learned in Boy Scouts, if you don't like the law, try to have it changed in an orderly manner, rather than disobey it. Failing that, if you're going to break the law, don't get caught.
and some teachers get kicks back / $X for each sale some even rip off pages and if you have a used book you fail.
their monopoly
He didn't get no edumacation.
Learn to love Alaska
It's file sharing. Piracy is the kind of stuff the next Tom Hanks movie is all about. Killing people. Brutality. That's piracy. Some educator uploading educational materials or some 12 year old in his mommy's basement downloading Katy Perry's bilge is NOT piracy. By letting the proprietarians label it as piracy, and then taking the LGBT tack of "owning the epithet" has been a complete failure. We need to call it what it is: file sharing, and demand that others call it that as well. Abandon notions of piracy and enter the next phase of human information distribution, and the access to knowledge it provides. Because It's The Right Thing To Do.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Isn't that the country that Dr. Doom is dictator of?
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Latvian.
Latvian who?
Please open door. Is cold.
The raid was based on a complaint from the publisher (Google Translate to English), which has a near-monopoly on educational materials in Latvia, often linked with shady connections in the Ministry of Education
Here's a free protip. Live in a former soviet bloc?
Are you lacking the skills to be anonymous?
Is there a monopoly on something?
Don't challenge it.
Finis.
Please help metamoderate.
All my life I've learned with "pirated" material: throughout school, my teachers copied all kinds of materials regardless of whether or not it was copyrighted - including my primary school teachers hand-copying entire pages of grammar or math books and giving away dittoed copies, photocopies of of all kinds... whatever was necessary to learn. Learning was considered "fair use" when I was young. Nobody in their right mind thought twice before copying something for education purposes.
Then when I started dabbling in computers, I started "pirating" software all by myself. I knew what I was doing was illegal, yet it didn't feel wrong. I learned C with an illegal copy of Turbo C. I learned CAD with an illegal copy of AutoCAD. I learned everything I know with an illegal copy of something.
Sure I shafted Borland, AutoDesk and all the others, but then I bet they made a whole lot of money afterwards, when I and all the others like me hit the job market and started using their products professionally - on seats paid by the companies I worked for to the tune of many thousands more than a single user seat.
I don't know how I would have gotten an education without pirated material. I don't know how kids today get an education if their teachers should fear jail when they use pirated material. What a sorry state society is in...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ownership (all ownership) is the right to deny use. This is as true of intellectual property ownership as it is of tangible item ownership. And it's not a bad thing as many will knee jerk to scream. Ownership is a right to treat that which we earn as extensions of our body. If we have a right to deny the use of our bodies, then, by extension, we have a right to deny use of that which we own.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Re: Do they even have fair use in Latvia?
That's a very good point. Someone in Latvia or with knowledge of Latvian law would have to clue us in. I'm sure there's quite a few someones on /. who could tell us. Calling all Latvian programmers (or lawyers, or college students who might know...) !!!
this is practically the definition of willful copyright infringement.
I wont say the punishment was just, but it should have been expected.
This is pure copyright breach, damaging the publisher. Of course here on slashdot it is often minimalised.
$4 is a reasonable price for a book. I can imagine that the salary level in Latvia is lower than in Western Europe or the USA, even so, it could compare to say a $15 book in the west. It is not a rip-off price.
If yu don't want to pay for something, then don't use it.
He didn't get no edumacation.
He don't needed no foursed corntroll.
Hi - not Latvian, but a professor (with some little IP education). Generally speaking, "educational use" is not held to mean "so long as it's for education, do whatever you want". Educational use typically means discussion and criticism - using excerpts and passages to demonstrate a particular point, or using an example from a text. If the teacher had used fractions of the book as part of his lessons, he would likely have been covered under fair use provisions in many nations (including the US and Australia, where I teach). Conversely, wholesale duplication of a text is rarely considered fair use in an educational context.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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He didn't get no edumacation.
What do you expect? He couldn't afford the textbooks!
in latvia, history teaches you!
And most likely full of spin, error, omission, or propaganda... lol
It's more than four times the price of a $0.99 song. Throw the ebook at him!
Why limit it to one? At premium prices, customers demand premium quality. US history books will have all four.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
This story was covered in local TVs. Although I also hate all those copyright guys. But this time its more or less Ok. They warned that guy many times. When he didnt react they went to police.
textbook publishers use all kinds of BS to keep there monopoly on educational materials in place.
I'm not sure. When in Finland these teachers had the over-the-weekend marathon to create a math textbook and put it into Github, they commented that they might as well release it for free, as the profit they get from books is always so small anyway. And, in increasing amounts you can read high-quality material for free from the intertubez, further shaking the position of commercially published books.
Nice to see police chase book copyers that eagerly. There was news recently where they could not bother to go and get back someones stolen laptop
Wonder if that programmer should have claimed copyright infrigment.
textbook publishers use all kinds of BS to keep there monopoly on educational materials in place.
I'm not sure. When in Finland these teachers had the over-the-weekend marathon to create a math textbook and put it into Github, they commented that they might as well release it for free, as the profit they get from books is always so small anyway
Do note that author != publisher... [in the very most cases]
Good thing it was a history text, right, Joe? It's not as though you could actually afford an updated English text, under the terms you exaggerate.
The publisher was not at all being unreasonable. They were offering the textbook at an extremely reasonable price. It was *still* copied in (presumably) violation of Latvian law (most countries fair use laws don't apply to public distribution of large sections of material).
This isn't RIAA tactics, this is an absolutely fair complaint. Of course the police may not have needed to 'raid', but perhaps they were worried/lazy about proving the act if the suspect was able to wipe.
If anyone can read Latvian, and knows their textbook market:
Was this book available at the bookstores?
A can easily imagine a teacher making available book excerpts from different history books describing the same period.
One book written in 1950s USSR, one from 1980s USSR, one from 1990s Latvia and a current one.
Just to show different spin, errors, omissions and propaganda.
Of course 1990s textbook, despite not being available in bookstores for many years, would be still encumbered by copyright law and its publisher would still be in business and not very fond of using its products as an example of propaganda.
The publisher should just be suing them without an expensive police raid paid for by the taxpayer.
Exactly. Some universities were getting in hot water (Univ. of Washington, late 80's-early 90's), as some profs were getting the copy centers to make significant xerox copies of text books for their courses (mostly lib arts classes, it seemed. I guess for math, physics & engineering, one sort of expected to keep the books as references in the future...). Which as a student was nice, not having to spend $200 on an obscure text book, but $20 on a photocopied "excerpt". But then the publishers started catching on and wagging their dicks around, and the copy centers had to push back more on the profs... So, in a sense, this is nothing new, really, just different media or technology.
Latvarians should realise by now Doom decides what History is allowed to be taught to his citizens.
I agree raiding his house was too much, but he shouldn't have published the book without permission.. What the publisher should have done is ask the teacher to remove the book (even though it's propably too late anyway, but raiding his house doesn't help there either).. But we don't know if the publisher did indeed first ask the teacher to remove it, and maybe he might have just refused to do it, and therefore the house was raided (in that case the raid was IMHO ok (if no violence was used))..
US gov't is fucked up to the N'th degree.
3rd-world gov'ts are fucked up to the N+1 degree.
Table-ized A.I.
why is copyright infringement a criminal act? Why are the police involved in protection the interests of companies? Should it be a civil action that does not require law enforcement, they have better and more meaningful things to do.
You guys have it all backwards the fact that it's a $4 textbook should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the issue was not "gouging" by textbook manufacturers as some are insinuating. The price of the book was well within the purchase ability of anybody who wanted one.
If the book was $400, you guys would complain that piracy is justified because it's gouging. If it's $4 you complain it's justified because it's trifling.
In all seriousness, Back when I first went into science and engineering about 20 years ago, I thought it was because it was an ethical pursuit with basically honest and noble people.. unlike, say, finance or lawyering. I am not exaggerating nor trolling when I say that more than a decade of reading the lamest possible pseudophilosophical justification of copyright infringement in slashdot fora have well beaten that naivete out of me.
It's somewhat depressing to see that educational material publishers work the same methods world-wide...
Take the same book every 1-2 years, hash the chapter numbers, change numerical values in math problems, perhaps tweak color pallets and you have a new edition... Which is incompatible to the last year's one effectively killing the second-hands market.
And those same people got a tremendous amount of shit and legal threats from such publishers for doing that.
shit and legal threats
Ah the American dream :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
They can write all they want, it probably won't help. Good and cheap materials have been available for long time, but they can't be used in school.
Public school curricula are chosen by committees and government bodies who make sure that people are taught "properly", in conformance with government-approved ideology and content. This choice includes awarding textbook to a small cadre of publishers who produce government-conforming materials and are guaranteed monopolies. It works that way in the US and much of Western Europe.
Yes, unfortunately, primary and secondary education in the US are also dominated by government-imposed monopolies and government-mandated curricula.
The publishers didn't get their monopolies by nefarious business practices, they were handed their monopoly by school boards and voters.
So please point the finger where it needs to be pointed: at school boards and the voters who keep opposing school choice.
It was probabibly another attack onn thier Russian majority who are denied all basic Human rights and criminially persecuted too.
Actually, he barely exaggerated at all.
Well, that's a good one. I wish this was the case everywhere.
actually the whole law in english is availible here. http://www.vvc.gov.lv/export/sites/default/docs/LRTA/Likumi/Copyright_law.doc
but we have rather heavy corruption in that matter.
Do note that in most contracts, if (author != publisher) author= publisher; That is, authorship is assignod to the publisher, as author-at-law, without various risks that still remain with the person who did the work.
You have to remember that these books have far more authors than the headline authors, and although the headline authors might have a pretty good contract, the others won't.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
the textbook actually costs about 6 lats each part (11 dolalrs) there are 4 parts and 4 practical parts (5 dollars each)
for comarison average monthly salary in latvia is about 350 lats give or take.
Last year the very same publisher (Zvaigzne ABC) that just sent a mail to an author - "We decided to publish your story in our book - don`t worry, you will receive nothing for that, because the book will be for `educational use`. Just reply whether you agree with the changes we did to your text".
Publisher points to the Authorship law ("Autortiesbu likums") in Latvia, chapter 19 that says that works can be published without permission of author if it happens for educational use and studies and if the result is published in books suitable for education.
Link: http://www.diena.lv/kd/eksperti-blogeri/kilblokas-nebija-majas-13951642 , reaction to it: http://www.diena.lv/kd/literatura/rakstnieki-aizliedz-publicet-savus-darbus-zvaigznes-abc-gatavotaja-isprozas-antologija-13951925
So there is a very thin line between definitions of piracy and legal use. Seems that publishing just the contents of book in a "wrapper" book would be enough to avoid such hassle.
So it would appear that if the teacher had provided access to the students to make their own copies, everything would have been kosher (or the latvian equivalent of kosher) except for the payment of a fee. It only says that personal copies may be made without permission. It does not state that those personal copies can be made "free of cost". Also, the preamble to the document says that the translation is provided merely as a courtesy and only the original Latvian text constitutes the actual law. I also did a text search for the word "fair", and found that it only exists in conjunction with two words:
"fair compensation" occurs 4 times"unfair earnings" occurs once
and "fair use" never occurs at all.
so it would appear that the concept of "fair use" is not at all addressed by the Latvian law in the format you pointed out to me, at least in the English translation of it.
Who actually holds the copyright? When my structural engineering prof wanted to make copies of a textbook for us (which the publisher hadn't reprinted in a decade because they said it wasn't worth it for them), he just called up the author who was a colleague of his. The publisher didn't have exclusive rights, so he got permission from the author to copy it, and had the copy center run off a few dozen copies for us.
He didn't get no edumacation.
What do you expect? He couldn't afford the textbooks!
Perhaps not, but you know who CAN afford it?
Google.
"Do no evil" my fucking ass...
"I've got some advice for you, little buddy. Before you point your finger, you should know that I'm the man. If I'm the man, then you're the man, and he's the man aswell, so you can point your fucking finger up your ass."
"Hooker With a Penis" - Tool
I was going to do "... the government it deserves." quote, but I don't know who it was.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I also haven't learned to preview my posts for closing tags. God damn it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
and in the us the same book will be $200-$400 updated 1-2 times a year.
To me educational publishing is a sham, and you hit the nail on the head as to why: The insanely high prices breed a huge secondary market, so the publishers simply call each new printing a "new edition" and labels the old ones obsolete, which allows the book stores to pay next to nothing for the books used because "they're out of date!"
Who did what now?
He didn't get no edumacation.
He don't needed no foursed corntroll.
No ferced sercusm, im de clessrem. . . .
Actually, this is BEGINNING to change, but it will be QUITE some time before it shows up in academic publishing.
In Fiction, there are quite a few authors who primarily e-publish fiction and sell through Amazon and Barnes&Noble. and are making, if not megabucks, at least decent earnings (one author I'm personally familiar with has made in excess of US$ 100K this way. . . )
Kristine Kathryn Rusch often blogs on the topic. . . .
When I was in college I took an Analysis of Algorithms course as part of my CS degree. The textbook was $100-something and it was on it's 16th edition or so. Several weeks into the semester, my copy of the book was accidentally destroyed. Searching for a used copy online, I found one of the first several editions for about $10. I took a chance that no that much changed. Aside from the pages yellowing with age, I never found any differences to the current edition. The current edition actually had a few minor typos that the earlier edition that I had didn't have.
You found a way to quote a Tool song in discussion of a Latvian history textbook. Well played, player.
Dr. Doom decides what's fair use.
And naturally the department heads as well as the professors never actually read the text books in the first place and remained unaware that there was no reason for the newer editions.
It is a shocker that professors tend to parrot what they were taught and never actually go to source documents . They can have an entire career lasting many decades without a clue that they are in great error over substantial facts. It is like people play a role. The professor plays the role as he was taught it. And if the putz happens to find out that a traditional fact is greatly in error and admits it there may be hell to pay. It puts a chick in the armor of other professors who have ranted nonsense that they were drilled on back in their day at old ivy.
These days how would one even attempt to teach young kids history. Old school would go on and on about Columbus discovering America. Simple stuff does prevent confusion. Now imagine a teacher telling the kids that it looks like just about everybody discovered America. For example it would be no shock at all to hear that an ancient vessel from Minoa landed in the US. And they just might have made it all the way back home and announced it in their nation. But we can't know that other than the fact that we have an ancient Minoan tablet found in the center of our nation that has to be valid as it was found before Minoa was unearthed or their language was known to exist.
Anyway I have no problem with that. More insidious however are the constant revisions which render them worthless after a year or two, or even worse "work books". Work books are the kind where the child writes answer into the page in thereby making it impossible to reuse.
Here in Ireland almost all the primary school books are like this and the cost of books could be 100 per annum per child. The state could ban the practice in an instant and save parents a lot of money but for some reason they won't.
When I was in college I took an Analysis of Algorithms course as part of my CS degree. The textbook was $100-something and it was on it's 16th edition or so. Several weeks into the semester, my copy of the book was accidentally destroyed. Searching for a used copy online, I found one of the first several editions for about $10. I took a chance that no that much changed. Aside from the pages yellowing with age, I never found any differences to the current edition. The current edition actually had a few minor typos that the earlier edition that I had didn't have.
Not to be cynical or anything but the typos were probably the changes that 'justified' the new editions...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The worst part isn't that publishers produce "updated" editions that really haven't changed. The worst part is that professors are not allowed to use old editions of textbooks because of the accreditation bodies, no matter what the subject is. How many times has calculus or physics changed in the last 50 years anyway? Doesn't matter, everybody has to pretend that 12th edition physics is more up-to-date than 11th edition physics.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
That's so funny I thought the exact same thing before I opened the comments :) God bless you Yakov Smirnov! Did you know Yakov has a PHD in positive psychology?
Oh! You poor fool! Those weren't typos at all. THOSE ARE THE NEW FORMULA!! Oh, poor, poor fool - you'll NEVER be able to analyze algorithms properly now, because you're using the old formulas! [/sarcasm]
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I did the same. However I found that new "editions" usually would just intentionally mess up the chapter and page numbers making it difficult to follow along.
Had nothing to do with content, and everything to do with primitive DRM.
Techerz, leef dem keeds awoon.
I worked with someone who contributed to a chemistry textbook and they showed me how the editors (or someone at the publishing house) had deliberately introduced errors into the text and figures so that they could be corrected in future editions. One example he showed me was a figure that had been present since the first edition that mysteriously had different errors in different editions, despite being otherwise identical (the graphic was the same but different parts were mislabeled in different editions -- the first edition was the only one that was entirely correct).
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Education has not changed much. I suspected most of my professors to be shady.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
What?
How does Google have ANYTHING to do with this story, parent post, or subject matter?
Yes, Google is indeed rich enough to purchase some textbooks. How insightful, thank you for contributing to the conversation. And OH LOOK, someone with mod points agrees with you.
Now... the point of contention I have with this statement is that somehow, by having money, Google is evil. ... Could you explain that a bit for me? Are we supposed to feel bad about the paychecks we bring home? Should be look at our nest eggs and savings and cackle like some evil mastermind knowing that we screwed someone over to acquire it?
It's posts like this, and they've been going on for a FUCKING DECADE, that make me feel like the majority of the hate, suspicion, and fear of Google is only so much jealousy. Now, don't get me wrong, if Google decided to turn Sith and... I dunno, blackmailing everyone with secrets gleamed from their free email service, then yeah that would be horrible. And they certainly have the potential to be evil. A lot of it. Almost (but not quite) the potential that Microsoft has, to pull out a comparable example. Quicker strike capabilities I guess. But by and far Google hasn't been even remotely as evil as Microsoft.
So really, if you hate "the Google" so much, you need to start coming up with more rational rants because otherwise you just kind of look like a fool and make the rational people trust Google even more.
(Also, it's "don't be evil", you're getting confused with the Japanese three-monkey thing).
in latvia, history teaches you!
That's actually a compliment to Latvians. It's too bad we didn't all learn from history, it wouldn't repeat itself so much if we did.
Latvia is a country! omg, I thought it was a place made up in the Simpsons tv show
Tas ir iemesls, kpc ms nevaram bt jaukas lietas.
Having Doctor Doom as their head of state? Now they are reading teacher. Depressing times.
Since we are all biological organisms with the same biologically driven behavior, whenever similar environments arise, similar solutions to deal with those environments will be used. In a certain respect history will always repeat itself simply due to our nature.
Generally speaking, "educational use" is not held to mean "so long as it's for education, do whatever you want". Educational use typically means discussion and criticism - using excerpts and passages to demonstrate a particular point, or using an example from a text.
It's important to note that the "fair use" guidelines in the U.S. are effectively the same for educational situations as they are for non-profit activities in general. It's a widely held misconception that there's some sort of "educator exception" for fair use, but there really isn't. Courts have generally recognized that fair use should be given a little more leeway in educational circumstances, but any (non-educator) person with a similar justification has effectively the same guidelines for fair use. Essentially, "whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes" is a factor to be considered in potential copyright violation claims, but that's all the legal guidance there is -- no specific education exception.
The ONLY significant copyright exception for educators isn't for copying at all. It's for "performance" or "display," and it used to only apply to face-to-face meetings in classrooms. That is, unlike some performance hall or something, an educator doesn't have to pay for rights to play a musical excerpt or film excerpt in class. A professor/teacher is free to put up images on a projection screen for educational purposes, without worrying about copyright protections. With the "Teach Act," this exception was expanded beyond face-to-face teaching to include "display" or "performance" through distance learning sites, as long as the sites are restricted to enrolled students (and conform to a number of other specific regulations).
Again, that exception for performance or display is the only official educational legal exception in the U.S., and it explicitly excludes textbooks, coursepacks, and other written materials that could otherwise be purchased for a class.
In general, there's really no such legal category as "educational use" in terms of actually making copies of something.
If the teacher had used fractions of the book as part of his lessons, he would likely have been covered under fair use provisions in many nations
Exactly -- under general "fair use," not necessarily specific to education. (Though again, fair use for educators is often easier to justify legally.)
(By the way, my interpretation of copyright law here is directly from the counsel's office at one of the top universities in the U.S.)
When I was in college I took an Analysis of Algorithms course as part of my CS degree. The textbook was $100-something and it was on it's 16th edition or so. Several weeks into the semester, my copy of the book was accidentally destroyed. Searching for a used copy online, I found one of the first several editions for about $10. I took a chance that no that much changed. Aside from the pages yellowing with age, I never found any differences to the current edition. The current edition actually had a few minor typos that the earlier edition that I had didn't have.
New editions in cutting edge fields make sense, but in such things "basic" botany or biology , not much has changed in the last long while. Some professors understand this and let you buy older editions, sometimes they tell you that you could fail the class without the newest edition.
Well for many textbooks the cost difference can be 95% between 1-2 editions, I'd recommend buying the half.com copy for $10, and compare it to the new one, sometimes every sentence and page#s match. First time you save $100+ dollars.
And American college students will have to buy each updated version for their classes.
Thanks for reminding us that english sucks. Why do we bother to spell these words differently when context clearly allows you to differentiate their/there/they're meaning? I guess the only benefit is that people like you can correct others, because if the intended word was not obvious from the context, you wouldnt have anything to say here.
And please dont bother to correct my grammar or spelling. Nobody cares about your desire to appear superior