Slashdot Mirror
$200 For a Bound Textbook That You Can't Keep?
netbuzz writes: "The worst of DRM is set to infest law school casebooks. One publisher, AspenLaw, wants students to pay $200 for a bound casebook, but at the end of class they have to give it back. Aspen is touting this arrangement as a great deal because the buyer will get an electronic version and assorted online goodies once they return the actual book. But they must return the book. Law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are calling it nothing but a cynical attempt to undermine used book sales, as well as the first sale doctrine that protects used bookstores and libraries."
They aren't in it to make the world a better place. They are in it for the money. And so it is perfectly logical for them to take as much as they can get.
Vote with your wallet.
Is this like a fatwallet hot deal ymmv?
That this will create a generation of lawyers and judges who have a fundamental hatred of DRM.
How will we change the past if we let these kids keep paper books, eh, comrades?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Future lawyers, enforcers for the parasitic ruling class, getting screwed by egregious rent seeking.
I would be laughing at law students and law teachers and lawyers in general, if I didn't know they'd "recoup" that money by screwing me later.
Ezekiel 23:20
I've been looking into going back to school and have gotten a more in-depth look at the academic textbook market and I can conclude it is all a big racket. The price of textbooks is already outrageous as it is -- I don't doubt that they would love to DRM all of them and have students give them back afterwards. Even after looking into the used textbook market, I couldn't find a way to save very much and the price they'll give you for a used but still in very good condition book is almost insulting. You would think we would want to make education more accessible and affordable for everyone, but between textbooks, student loans and other like scams it is a sad state of affairs.
I keep all my old textbooks. It's where I originally learned the material and I can dip in now and again to refresh my memory if need be.
Whilst it might not be for everyone, here I am sitting at my PC looking at my Computer Science books (purchased between 1995 and 1998) and I don't think I've opened any of them in the past 10 years (looking at you "Unix System Programming" by Haviland and Salama, reprinted in 1994).
If I get a DRM free digital version after the course has ended and the pricing is right, then this might actually be more useful than a pile of dead wood taking up space on my bookshelf - most of which is probably long out of date.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Any pretense to "education" is laughable. Universities' #1 job is to suck money out of people's pockets by creating artificial demand for graduates.
If the schools / banks where on the hook for default then they will push back on stuff like this.
maybe not the schools / teachers as some get so much per book and they put out a new edition each year or more often all the time.
and it's not just law school.
have bothered to research the law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Some other publisher attempted to impose a license upon the books they sold and were slapped down over a century ago.
A manufacturer is attempting to circumvent the secondary market by only lending its products instead of selling them. This isn't an end run around the "first sale" principle exactly because the publisher doesn't plan to sell the books in the first place.
What they are trying to do should be legal -- but hopefully it won't work because professors will refuse to assign this textbooks.
They'll make it back in their first hour on the job. Or maybe the first half hour on the job.
As a university faculty member I consider the cost of textbooks whenever I choose one for a course. I try to never require students to buy the book (I'm not always in charge of the course I teach, so I can't always do this), and I prefer books that are available on SpringerLink (whole-book DRM-free PDFs are available to all our students since our university subscribes). I doubt many faculty members will actually assign this textbook.
The student doesn't give it back? Sells it via an alternate market? Exactly how are they going to enforce this? Even in the original article, this is obviously unclear. I suppose they would try some DCMA attack on any site found to be selling the book. Would a EULA inside a book be enforceable?
Expect scanned and even perfectly good text copies of this book to be on all good torrent sites around the time it's supposed to be released
Well they took page outta their book with these DRM.
Where they force you to rent the box at price over 1-2 years that can add up to it's real bulk price.
Also if you have lost, not returned, burned up in a fire they want the full price of a new box.
and you can't buy the box or use one that was not returned and one that someone even payed the full price for.
I had a professor who required his class to purchase his textbook which was nothing but a book of blank pages that had his name on it. He required every assignment to be turned in on HIS books blank paper.
Crooked is Crooked. Till professors get it out of their head that they cant pull this kind of crap, publishers will have no problem finding professors who will push it onto their students.
Years back, when in yee olde academy, I used to run into costs surpassing $500 per semester for books. I think they're north of $1,000 for a full semester now.
Sooooo, I used to get all my books bought and would immediately head up up to the local copy shop and then spend around $120+ or so and get double-sided copies of all my books on 11" x 17" paper. Then I'd return the books for full refund and then pocket the difference, a savings of up to 70% or more off the cover price. The process would take a few hours but for a poor college student who was literally going without food here and there, it was worth it. It was moderately inconvenient to have to lug around bags filled with of stacks of photocopies but I managed.
Nowadays, this is all obsolete. The copiers are now digital and making digital PDF scans of the books (or copies) is certainly within the realm of reality.
http://www.diybookscanner.org/
These charming folks here have a scan fixture for $500 (you supply the cameras and light and computer and GPL software, however). I used to hear of frat houses on campus pooling cash to buy one or just a few books which would be passed around to all the members who are taking the same class.
I wonder how long it will take before some enterprising folks to start to pool their cash and buy (or build) one of these fixtures to get around artificially-created barriers such as we see here?
If I only possessed my textbooks while studying at university, I would never have had the chance to read any of them.
University projects and laboratory work consumed any time I had for reading books, and the lecture notes sufficed.
Where the textbooks *have* come in handy is for revising topics years after graduating.
Maybe this will cut down on the number of lawyers in the future. There are too many as it is right now.
When I was a computer savvy high school student back in 1994, I was fed up with having to lug 60 pounds of books to and from school every day (we had lockers, but weren't allowed to use them). It seemed like a really trivial concept to provide PDF documents of the books to those students who opted in. Hand me a CD at the beginning of the term and be done with it.
Here we are, some 20 years later, and the idea has still never been done in a reasonable way. The only logical conclusion is that educators are simply not interested in educating, their only interest is to sell the things students are obligated to purchase.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
It's the universities and teachers who choose what books the students must use. They could:
1) Boycott this publisher.
2) Act indifferently.
3) Enthusiastically join with this publisher.
Follow the money. I'm guessing it will be 2) or 3) above, depending on the deal the publisher strikes with the university.
My grad school forbade reselling case books, arguing that they were licensed not sold. If you put up a for sale sign on a campus bulletin board it got taken done. So we simply had an underground market as well as simply shared the books. Interestingly enough, while researching an article on the doctrine of first sale I learned it is not as black and white as some would think it is; with lots of variations state to state as well as defining what constitutes a sale.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Law School is a huge profit center, as lawyers sit with books. No labs, no electronics, just old school learning of a set course load. Get used to it, with the WEST publishing monopoly law books are stooopidly overpriced.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
The book had to have been lost in the mail, I know I sent it back out.
Well $200 for a book you can't keep, need to mail back (even if you get a digital version tho they can always revoke your rights to that as well) or I could torrent the book and save myself the headache and deny them the money...Screw it think I'll torrent that book even if I don't got the class I wanna do it just to spite them
This started a long time ago with VitalBooks at NYU Dental School
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Selling the Digital Version standalone ?
In 2005 I graduated in the top 10 of my law school class. I can confidently say there is very little need for students to buy "case books" nowadays.
First of all, casebooks are merely collections of cases (in the public domain) the author deems relevant to the subject matter. 99% of the cases inside can be found on Google Scholar or elsewhere on the Internet. Most law students are given free access to Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis as well. All you need is the list of cases in the casebook...you can find the cases for free.
Further, most of the time is better spent reading free or commercial summaries of the cases, rather than the cases themselves, but that is for each student to decide themselves.
When I was a student there was sadly no such thing as pirated books. What was really infuriating was that each class would require you to buy 4 or 5 books. You'd take the class and only open 1 or 2! And then you'd find out that one of the books was authored by your professor!
I quickly learned not to buy any of the books. The first day the professor would ask us to take it out I said "opps! forgot that one in my dorm!" share with someone the first day and pick it up on the way to my dorm. I recommend this strategy to anyone else thats newly attending college. It saved me thousands of dollars.
It's not unprecedented. I don't know the legal details but anyone who's ever been an in amateur production of a musical will tell you that Music Theatre, International will not sell you a script or a score. I believe the statement is that you have rented them. You are warned to make any markings lightly and in pencil and to erase them completely before returning them.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Is that like a renting fee?
Fortunately for you, most of you have never been in law school (I like to tell prospective law students that there are more amusing prisons in the mountains of Peru.). So you have had no reason to look at a law school casebook.
The name casebook distinguishes them from textbooks used by students in other fields. A casebook consists mostly of the reports of the decisions of courts (most often appellate courts) in actual decided cases. The case reports (thus the name cases) are usually edited to remove material not relevant to the main point the author is interested in (often irrelevant and trivial procedural issues from the lower court), the casebook author often includes notes of contrary or different cases and of relevant statutes.
There is usually no other material created by the so-called authors of the casebook.
Here is the main point. Reports of cases decided by courts are inherently public domain material regardless of their age. The same is true of statutes.
Almost all of the material in a casebook is not, and may not be, copyrighted.
Asserting intellectual property rights over reprinted public domain material is requires nerve to the point of chutzpah.
BTW, the restriction on resale is mostly like invalid as a restraint of trade, and will not be binding on subsequent purchasers such as used book merchants. It is also a violation of the Sherman Act.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Three lefts do though....
...most everyone borrows the one book from the library and then scans it to create their own "e-book." Not feature-rich, but it doesn't make you cash-poor, either. Posted as AC because © police are EVERYWHERE o_O
They will respect the way that DRM has used the law to relieve them from their money. Since they want to make money, they will have learned how creative use of DRM can do that, so they will try and find ways to work for DRM companies.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Stupid lawyers. If you had compulsory 80% requirement to attend a class you didn't go to a university. IF oyou tools actually take that kind of abuse it's pretty much what you deserve. Even calling 1st year students "kids" tells me a lot. A kindergarden for the slow but rich kids? Just follow the rules to the point, never think for yourself. Oh well, guess that kind of fits a lawyer. I mean, IT'S THE RULES. YOU GOT TO FOLLOW THE RULES. EVERYTHING WILL BE A CHAOS IF YOU DON'T. Stupid idiots.
So, do they rent the books out or sell them? If they rent I think it's ok to take them back. If it's a sale everyone can decide themselves if they want to trade the hardcopy for electrical version, right? The law school shouldn't REQUIRE anything, but learning. Why would they care if you have the book or not?
You come up with valid rent/lease constructions that by themselves don't feel a whole lot different from sales constructions. However, all the examples you give, come from markets where you have multiple options to buy the exact same product and also have an established market for lease/rent constructions.
While there are text book rental constructions, these do feel, present and act very differently compared to a sales construction. Not only that, you can get the same books "for keep" if you buy them, usually. This is a novelty construction for a book that just isn't for sale and the pricing isn't in the usual range for book rentals. That's what's makes it news.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Here in the Netherlands every case that could become jurisprudential or has been in the public will get published automatically on a government web site. While I understand that some states or federal government may choose not to do so because of costs, there should indeed be no publisher trying to get copyrights for publishing the same material. In fact, there should be a law that puts extreme fines on attempts to do this and make people behind companies that do this personally liable for damages. Who's going to write their congress representatives about this and make this law really happen?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
:D
WTF, I would ask my money back and switch universities in a heartbeat. You really took that abuse? God you are a lame duck :D
My University library always had a few copies of recommended course books in... maybe not the latest editions, but enough to get you going
Of course they were always checked out come exam time, but if you'd actually studied and made notes during the year when everyone else was slacking off, it was no problem
But this is defintively bullshit being fueled by outside agendas.
In my neck of the woods, educational institutions are legally allowed to break copyright for educational purposes. So it's fine to take one book and photocopy it a bazillion times.
Unless you live in a non-WTO member country, I highly doubt that's accurate. Maybe you're referring to the clause that sometimes appears in fair use/fair dealing statutes that says "multiple copies for classroom use"? If so, no, that doesn't mean you can take a book and copy the entire thing an indefinite number of times (although it does give a lot more flexibility than most educational institutions use).
I would wager it's more likely that that may be the de facto practice where you live, and nobody enforces the law.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
SPOILER ALERT
It's in Braille
Why would I want a monstrous book of case law to lug around? There's an old quote "You can't grep dead trees"
I'd much rather have a searchable e-book.
I mean it's still an asshat move but there's a reason there aren't anymore telephone books.
The modern economy, with multibillionaires making money shifting money in spreadsheets, high-frequency trading, the non-ownership of physical goods, and general insanity is mind boggling.
The world's economy is built on lies and the imagination of psychopaths. I guess we're just lucky they have such strong force of personality, that they can keep it running.
That's the equivalent of what we call a 'third-tier toilet' here in the US. Generally Aussie and Kiwi law students are substandard; only the Germans (and a few French students, go figure) have performed to spec so far. I know this first hand; we had exchange programs with two schools from down under where I attended, and your people regularly get their asses handed to them here while our people tend to go down there and dominate.
And no, I'm not joking. I never knew there were rednecks in Asia until I ran into the Oz folks and kiwis.
Put it this way, if you show up to class and haven't read the cases and other assigned materials, the Socratic method will be brutal. One of our professors was a retired judge, and he'd simply drop you from the course for wasting his (and the classes) time if it happened twice.
Obligatory Link to "The Right to Read" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
If you could default on your school loans, the standard procedure would be for virtually every student to declare bankrupcy the day after graduation. Most of them don't have any credit worth protecting. 10 years later, they their still have their degree. They are noticable richer, and they have a clean credit report. No doubt, lenders would also quickly stop even counting the bankrupcy if filed within a year of college graduation anyway, as they would know exeactly what was going on.
Law school textbooks are among the worst when it comes to actual value. The majority of such books are typically known as "case books" because they simply contain abridged versions of legal opinions selected by the author(s). There is minimal interstitial text, usually a few pointless questions that are supposed to cause a law student to think about the legal implications in greater detail. These are routinely skipped when briefing the case and integrating the same into an outline for study before the one great test of the semester. They are wholly useless books outside the confines of law school as the cases they present are abridged, and often times presented simply to show the historical development of the law. Selling them to other law students at the end of the course was the only way to recoup any sort of value from the texts at all. The promise of receiving a digital copy to keep at the end is meaningless because the value of the book is non-existent once the course concludes. And the publisher knows it, hoping the promise of a digital copy will forestall claims of first sale doctrine violation. I had just two instructors who didn't buy into the law textbook scam. They provided us with a series of legal cites to cases and Code sections that we should review, knowing full well we could pull them off of Westlaw/Lexis Nexis (or, these days, Google Scholar) to review. Both of these instructors taught the most informative, interesting, and useful courses I had in all three years of law school, all without the extra $120 fee for a useless collection of partial cases. I wish more professors followed suit with these guys, who were both active lawyers and not full time professors.
Time to boycott and protest these professors who support evil publishers. The professors who are writing textbooks are salaried. Make their support of evil organizations painfull.
Professor had the gall to insist we buy the newest edition of his textbook. Like Latin has not changed in 2,000 years.
It's been said elsewhere in this thread that the textbook publishing industry is nothing more than a racket. The publishers routinely release "new" editions to textbook which only differ in having the problem numbers rearranged to attempt to make old editions useless for current classes. The prices in the textbooks are gouged beyond belief. The publisher makes more profit off of a class of students than the instructor does, which makes no sense on margin.
Part of the problem is that students can't vote with their wallets. The people that make the buying decisions are the professors, or worse the departments. Even without the occasional conflict of interests, these agents have no economic incentive to reduce costs for students. Students' only option to "vote with their wallets" is to look for a different academic program or school, which is rather absurd to regard as an "option". It is only out of the good will of the professor that costs for the students can realistically be minimized, but there are no real incentives to support this at most institutions.
Once upon a time, there was value added in having a publisher. But this is the 21st century, and there are ways for textbook authors to publish without imposing onerous costs on students. There are even some good publishers that will provide manuscript services at fairly minimal cost. So as I see it, the big textbook publishers have become nothing more than rent collectors in the style of the RIAA/MPAA, leeching off of the work of others. The good news is that academic culture seems to be changing. The younger generation of teachers is sensitive to these issues, and open source publishing looks poised to take off. I personally would view it as an ethical imperative to publish any textbook of my own under Creative Commons, and I think this attitude is becoming increasingly popular.
not much different than a professor writing and publishing their own book as required for the class, which they "update" every year so the last class version cannot be resold and used again.
Been going on for a loong time around UC schools down to the state, and city colleges.
Now please give me my $ 200 and you get your book back.
Most people against marijuana have tried it with no ill effects.
Interesting theory, but I'm not convinced it is backed by evidence.
I have not tried it (unless you count passive smoking!) but I am against marijuana because I have seen the ill effect it had on someone else.
and then the cost school will go down / useless majors will go a way. Even some kind of half way system that stops the abuse and does not all students a free out.
What you guys don't realize us that this could lead to fewer law school graduates and so fewer patent and copyright trolls.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Shows K.S. Kyosuke using ad hominem attacks on apk. That's illogical + offtopic. Apk challenged him fairly. K.S. Kyosuke ran from it.
K.S. Kyosuke used illogical off topic ad hominem attacks on apk. Apk challenged him fairly. K.S. Kyosuke ran from it.
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...