How so? The law specifies that patents have a term of 20 years from the filing date
Whether that is applicable or not depends on whether the patent has actually been published or not.
See 35 U.S.C. 181:Secrecy of certain inventions and withholding of patent
If the government wants perpetual rights to something, there is a simple form they fill out and issue an order every year.
The invention stays secret, and nobody is allowed to practice the patent.
It's 20 years from the date the patent is published -- if it never gets published in the record, that expiration date can be pushed forward indefinitely.
I guess NASA has already calculated that they would profit more by selling their patent rather than licensing it.
The article said they are giving an exclusive license for it, not selling it
This is interesting... since that suggests NASA still owns the patent, as a government owned patent it can be perpetual,
that is the patent might never expire.
Which could afford them the opportunity to issue "exclusive licenses" to the same invention over and over again.
Once this exclusive license expires, auction again, at much higher price now, that the technoloy is widely in use, etc, etc...
Much easier to get huge lump sums from the 'exclusive licensee', who will handle all the messy sublicensing stuff [if indeed the patent gets sublicensed, rather than used exclusively by the licensee's product].
I wouldn't make it retroactive (ex post facto), but at least stop the extensions.
It's not ex post facto or retroactive. Congress has the power to change the duration of copyright, whenever it wants, and already did increase the term for existing works and take works out of the public domain.
Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to secure for authors rights for limited times.
They can change what type of rights and who/when they are securing them for at any time.
There is no contract with congress; they can grant additional rights, or take away existing ones at any time.
Retroactive, would be passing a law requiring users to pay royalties for a copyright work, and
demanding people who used the work when the law was not in force, pay the royalties.
Retroactive, would be passing a law extending the term, bringing a public domain work back into copyright, and declaring anyone who distributed the previously public domain works as criminals to be fined or jailed for their acts of distribution, before the law came into force.
This was not ex post facto, because people who were distributing works that had been taken from the public domain back into copyright were not made guilty of infringement, for their actions that were taken when the works were in the public domain.
I am not suggesting congress retroactively forgive the copyright infringement of anyone who pirated a work, when the longer term was in force.
The taxes are paid by the customers, not by the sellers. As the customers reside (and purchase) in the state, they must pay.
It sounds like they are attempting to intimidate residents of their own state and make an end run around the constitution, which reserves the power to regulate interstate commerce explicitly for the US congress, and explicitly denies the states the power to lay tarrifs or taxes on interstate commerce.
In other words, states trying to "tax the customer", regarding the amount they paid in these 'interstate commerce' transactions, would seem on its face to be something the states trying to do it should get severely penalized for by the USG.
The states don't even have a right to regulate that the dollar amount or existence of an interstate commerce transaction be told to them, let alone tax it.
Specifically: the courts should declare this unconstitutional, and order the states that collected this fraudulent tax to return these unjustly obtained gains to the taxpayers who they were extorted from.
Conducting business transactions and transferring goods to someone out of state is called interstate commerce.
And the supreme law of the land says that the power to regulate interstate commerce belongs exclusively to the US congress, and specifically indicates that states do not have the power to lay tarrifs, duties, imposts, or otherwise tax imports.
In other words.. no... the foreign state doesn't have authority or power to regulate you transferring goods into their state; that authority has been explicitly reserved for the feds.
Project Gutenberg is excellent - but if we extrapolate the current rate of copyright expansion, books published this century may never enter the public domain.
We just need an act of congress to reduce the term of copyright back to 20 years, and place all works published prior to 1990 in the public domain at once.
... and assumed the launch control center has been blown away, then proceed to start the launch sequence on their own?
If they ever had it, maybe they were smart enough to turn that feature off, disable it, when the missile wasn't already armed targetted and preparing for launch, or remove it from the programming, when the cold war ended?
Another possibility is multiple redundant communications networks, and a "fail to disable" if other links are still responsive
Just hope there is no bug. ICBM launch controls, nuke arming, and targetting are three things that cannot be allowed to have bugs.
So one broken LCC can trigger a byzantine fault, a DoS of the entire system, and which LCC is causing the problem can't be identified without shutting them all down.... nice
I'm just glad the missiles are apparently intelligent enough to respond with error codes, and the system failure didn't lead to an arming sequence and launch at whatever direction they were pointed...
I'm more concerned that the intrusion alarms were offline. I wonder if they bothered to check that the warheads are still there?!?
This sort of thing makes one wonder if there wasn't foul play involved.... the intrusion alarms just conveniently go out of commission for a while?
Makes one wonder if there wasn't foul play, as in some al quaeda sympathizer mucking around with the programming or RAM chips and injecting malicious code
That is just not practical. I develop and host websites. If I need to change registrars because someone wasn't happy with their web designer and they came to me.
The registrar is responsible for registering the domain and has nothing whatsoever to do with design or hosting.
Seriously, you make buying a domain name sound WORSE than going to the DMV. First off, what's the point of having employees if the principal can't delegate responsibilities such as picking up certified mail and signing for
it,
The registry could offer some flexibility in regards to the PO Box rule by offering another option: have a statement signed by two different witnesses and notarized.
The registrar would be required to verify the notarization, and provide a publicly viewable scan of the document, with a URL placed in the WHOIS record.
A notarized statement, with a copy of the letters of incorporation could also be used.
Some combination of these 'enhanced verification' methods could be used to lift or reduce other restrictions in domain registration.
What i'm saying is not that the holder of the domain can't have employees, but they can't have it both ways.
You can't list one person as owner, and have another person register the domain.
The employee can be listed as the primary contact, and therefore the 'principal' that owns the domain name. That employee would list their address, receive the restricted mail, sign for it, and sign the form.
The primary contact and legal owner of the domain is that employee or officer as far as the registry is concerned.
This says nothing about what the employee can do with the domain -- if the registrant is a corporation or other organization, it's up to them to impose any legal requirements on the employee that are required to ensure the employee does not steal the domain or fail in their fiduciary duty to transfer the domain to an officer later designated to be the primary contact of record.
...until they just rootkit a few servers that is on someone else's domain.
They already do, but there are a finite relatively small number of servers that they can easily rootkit, and once those are blacklisted, they're blacklisted.
It might not be perfect, but it makes things much harder, for spammers: using totally fake information and stolen CCs to register domains becomes especially hard, since they now need a fraudulent physical address they can take mail at, risks of getting caught are higher, and hosting providers can look at the contact info in WHOIS and do a better job at refusing to open accounts for contacts that have been associated with known spam domains.
The numbers of windows workstations are much larger, and the main participants in botnets which are used to host spam sites.
If it were just compromised servers hosting phishing and spam sites, the spam problem would be much smaller than it is today.
There are an infinite number of throwaway domains they can register, limited only by the number of times the spammer can shell out $10; if their average spamming run nets them $100, before that domain gets blacklisted and they move on to another one, it's financially worth it to the spammer to just keep registering new domains domains.
It is more expensive to register domains on a "premium" TLD. Since fewer domains are registered on the TLDs, there will be fewer used by spammers.
Because people black list domains used by spammers; URI-based blacklists, and RHS blacklists that blacklist by domain name.
Spam filters start to recognize them, in any case.
So spammers register thousands of domains at the cheapest prices available (probably using stolen cards or multiple shell companies)
.NET and.COM are probably the cheapest TLDs to register throwaway domains on.
It follows, that spam might be reduced, with greater costs or qualifications to register a domain.
I for one would be in favor of a "paper" requirement.
ICANN should require that every domain have a primary 'contact address' verified by the registrar that is listed in public WHOIS.
ICANN should require registrars to verify BY PAPER certified+restricted mail to each new primary contact address,
which must be an address in a country the registrar does business in, and may not be a PO Box or forwarded address.
The registrant should be required to SIGN a document mailed, and send it back, before the domain can be placed in the zone.
And the signature must match the signature on the mail slip.
The slip signed must include a statement agreeing to the ICANN policies, and certifying that the signer is the principal, and
the address provided belongs to the principal who owns the domain, and not a proxy, agent, or designee.
And from then on, that 'contact information' can be used by the owner of THAT account to designate as the org contact for domains registered or transferred.
Using a different contact for a domain, requiring going through verification again.
For a minor inconvenience, spammers could be stopped.
Remember... how in the US the regulators are generally lobbied and controlled by the companies they regulate.
Remember, how the FDA has threatened General Mills, with Cheerios being classified as a drug, just because the product is marketed as something that lowers cholesterol when eaten as breakfast?
Because Cheerios is seen as a threat to drug companies that make drugs for treating high cholesterol, GM may be forced to take their cereal off the market.
I fear that in reality, the big drug companies that make the inhalers would feel so threatened that they would call in favors and pay off their buddies/pet lobbyists at the FDA to declare those 'natural remedy' products a drug, clearly intended as a medical treatment, and ban the natural remedy company from marketing it.
One example, Propranolol is a beta blocker originally indicated as a heart medication. It's quite effective and very safe.
Propranolol has been approved by the FDA for at least one purpose as safe.
That's entirely different from a doctor recommending a medication or type of treatment regimen whose safety has not been validated.
There's nothing illegal about a doctor prescribing an approved drug for an off-label indication.
The risk is not being arrested -- the risk is being sued for civil damages or malpractice, based on advising a treatment that has not been formally tested, should the person claim the treatment didn't work, or should the person claim their condition worsened.
While you are correct, it might also be so simple that you can whip up an herbal extract and put it in an atomizer. I suspect that a water-based extract of some bitter herb is all that is necessary
Yes... if people self-medicate, at their own risk, some people could try that.
Their doctor/health care professional, however, would be taking so huge a legal risk to recommend or order use of a product as a medication not FDA approved for that usage, they would probably not do that
Without someone running clinical trials, there are many unknowns.
it would not only be safer for children and people in general but vastly cheaper.
Cheaper?
If it can't be patented and net drug companies billions of $$$; I doubt there will be a company to spend the millions for the research required to get "bitter-taste-based medication" through FDA approval.
Once they have the patent on the method of operation ("bitter tasting substance used to treat COPD, or bitter tasting substance used to treat asthma by stimulating lung taste receptors"), they will charge the standard markups all proprietary drugs get.
IOW -- it will probably be more expensive, or we'll probably never see a product based on that come to market that can be legally marketed as such. Just a bunch of studies that show the idea is promising.
However.... this may imply more students understand and can use the calculus when they are finished.. but fewer students understand the formalisms, and maybe cannot prove as much things that rely on calculus in mathematical terms that would withstand scrutiny, since they haven't learned about the formalisms. (?)
Surely, not being taught the formalisms is comes at some cost, that transformation of calculus instruction can't truly be lossless, or can it?
In what way? Not being flippant, I'm genuinely unsure as to what about calculus has changed in the last 50 years.
Nothing about the underlying math changed, but there are things that can change in calculus instruction -- some schools changed what parts of calculus they chose to cover, changed the breadth/depth of coverage and how they covered in it, arrangement of coverage; for example, how much mathematical rigor, and which theorems/proofs they included in their coverage; which proofs students were required to understand, what types of things undergrad calculus students are supposed to be able to prove rigorously, etc.
Now, think of how easy it is to copy digital media...how will this reduce piracy?
Because the "cost of the book" is rolled into that 'mandatory materials fee' the student has to pay to get into the class.
In other words, they pay for the cost of the book automatically, just by joining the class, there's no "opt out" method to not have or use the book -- pirating it provides them no benefit, since they are administratively required to pay money that is then used by the school to deliver them their copy.
The library argument isn't too persuasive, though, because the libraries should still have the paper version.
Didn't you hear about the new Kindle lending feature?
You go to the library, presumably... load the book on the library's kindle, and share it with yourself.
The libraries ncopies of the book is decremented by one. And you just go home with the book on your eBook later.
5 days later, or within 2 hours if they suspect you of "using the library's version" when you should have bought that book, your eBook is automatically deleted and goes back to the library
They already did that with new editions every year or every 6 months.
However, this will reduce the number of dead trees...
It will also reduce the number of greenbacks in students' pockets while simultaneously increasing the number of greenbacks in professors' and book publishing company executive's (and maybe eventually shareholders') pockets.
With more greenbacks they can make more, more expensive eBooks. Thus progress marches on
From a professor's point of view who is hired to publish things (and teaching is just a secondary tedious annoying job requirement), what's not to like about it?
Wait... force their students to buy a new version of a book they wrote, by submitting a revision to obsolete the old version?
Sounds like a conflict of interest, and unjust enrichment scam... IMO the prof. should be fired by the university if this sort of thing is ever discovered.
There should be some rule that if the professor supplies the book, they cannot require it for the course, unless they pay any cost of the book new beyond the raw per-page cost for the ink and paper, that is... any cost of the book beyond, say $0.02 a page + $0.10 for softcover or + $1 for hardcover.
Slashdot Mirror
How so? The law specifies that patents have a term of 20 years from the filing date
Whether that is applicable or not depends on whether the patent has actually been published or not.
See 35 U.S.C. 181:Secrecy of certain inventions and withholding of patent
If the government wants perpetual rights to something, there is a simple form they fill out and issue an order every year. The invention stays secret, and nobody is allowed to practice the patent.
It's 20 years from the date the patent is published -- if it never gets published in the record, that expiration date can be pushed forward indefinitely.
big sites should start by redirecting all non-ssl traffic to https automatically.
Haven't you ever heard of SSLProxy or or SSLStrip?
With SSLProxy, the SSL connection is not secure.
With SSLStrip, the server may think the connection is SSL, but the client may not.
As long as the 'redirect to HTTPS' is transmitted over plain HTTP, that redirect can be intercepted and mangled.
I guess NASA has already calculated that they would profit more by selling their patent rather than licensing it.
The article said they are giving an exclusive license for it, not selling it
This is interesting... since that suggests NASA still owns the patent, as a government owned patent it can be perpetual, that is the patent might never expire.
Which could afford them the opportunity to issue "exclusive licenses" to the same invention over and over again. Once this exclusive license expires, auction again, at much higher price now, that the technoloy is widely in use, etc, etc...
Much easier to get huge lump sums from the 'exclusive licensee', who will handle all the messy sublicensing stuff [if indeed the patent gets sublicensed, rather than used exclusively by the licensee's product].
the alarms being offline with some other event such that, taken together, the two might point to a plot.
There could be another event that was simply not detected
Presumably, the alarms have a solid unique reason for existing. Being offline, a 2nd event could not be detected, perhaps... (shrugs)
I wouldn't make it retroactive (ex post facto), but at least stop the extensions.
It's not ex post facto or retroactive. Congress has the power to change the duration of copyright, whenever it wants, and already did increase the term for existing works and take works out of the public domain.
Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to secure for authors rights for limited times. They can change what type of rights and who/when they are securing them for at any time. There is no contract with congress; they can grant additional rights, or take away existing ones at any time.
Retroactive, would be passing a law requiring users to pay royalties for a copyright work, and demanding people who used the work when the law was not in force, pay the royalties.
Retroactive, would be passing a law extending the term, bringing a public domain work back into copyright, and declaring anyone who distributed the previously public domain works as criminals to be fined or jailed for their acts of distribution, before the law came into force.
This was not ex post facto, because people who were distributing works that had been taken from the public domain back into copyright were not made guilty of infringement, for their actions that were taken when the works were in the public domain.
I am not suggesting congress retroactively forgive the copyright infringement of anyone who pirated a work, when the longer term was in force.
The taxes are paid by the customers, not by the sellers. As the customers reside (and purchase) in the state, they must pay.
It sounds like they are attempting to intimidate residents of their own state and make an end run around the constitution, which reserves the power to regulate interstate commerce explicitly for the US congress, and explicitly denies the states the power to lay tarrifs or taxes on interstate commerce.
In other words, states trying to "tax the customer", regarding the amount they paid in these 'interstate commerce' transactions, would seem on its face to be something the states trying to do it should get severely penalized for by the USG. The states don't even have a right to regulate that the dollar amount or existence of an interstate commerce transaction be told to them, let alone tax it.
Specifically: the courts should declare this unconstitutional, and order the states that collected this fraudulent tax to return these unjustly obtained gains to the taxpayers who they were extorted from.
like transferring goods.
Conducting business transactions and transferring goods to someone out of state is called interstate commerce. And the supreme law of the land says that the power to regulate interstate commerce belongs exclusively to the US congress, and specifically indicates that states do not have the power to lay tarrifs, duties, imposts, or otherwise tax imports.
In other words.. no... the foreign state doesn't have authority or power to regulate you transferring goods into their state; that authority has been explicitly reserved for the feds.
Project Gutenberg is excellent - but if we extrapolate the current rate of copyright expansion, books published this century may never enter the public domain.
We just need an act of congress to reduce the term of copyright back to 20 years, and place all works published prior to 1990 in the public domain at once.
If they ever had it, maybe they were smart enough to turn that feature off, disable it, when the missile wasn't already armed targetted and preparing for launch, or remove it from the programming, when the cold war ended?
Another possibility is multiple redundant communications networks, and a "fail to disable" if other links are still responsive
Just hope there is no bug. ICBM launch controls, nuke arming, and targetting are three things that cannot be allowed to have bugs.
So one broken LCC can trigger a byzantine fault, a DoS of the entire system, and which LCC is causing the problem can't be identified without shutting them all down.... nice
I'm just glad the missiles are apparently intelligent enough to respond with error codes, and the system failure didn't lead to an arming sequence and launch at whatever direction they were pointed...
I'm more concerned that the intrusion alarms were offline. I wonder if they bothered to check that the warheads are still there?!?
This sort of thing makes one wonder if there wasn't foul play involved.... the intrusion alarms just conveniently go out of commission for a while?
Makes one wonder if there wasn't foul play, as in some al quaeda sympathizer mucking around with the programming or RAM chips and injecting malicious code
That is just not practical. I develop and host websites. If I need to change registrars because someone wasn't happy with their web designer and they came to me.
The registrar is responsible for registering the domain and has nothing whatsoever to do with design or hosting.
Seriously, you make buying a domain name sound WORSE than going to the DMV. First off, what's the point of having employees if the principal can't delegate responsibilities such as picking up certified mail and signing for it,
The registry could offer some flexibility in regards to the PO Box rule by offering another option: have a statement signed by two different witnesses and notarized.
The registrar would be required to verify the notarization, and provide a publicly viewable scan of the document, with a URL placed in the WHOIS record.
A notarized statement, with a copy of the letters of incorporation could also be used. Some combination of these 'enhanced verification' methods could be used to lift or reduce other restrictions in domain registration.
What i'm saying is not that the holder of the domain can't have employees, but they can't have it both ways. You can't list one person as owner, and have another person register the domain.
The employee can be listed as the primary contact, and therefore the 'principal' that owns the domain name. That employee would list their address, receive the restricted mail, sign for it, and sign the form.
The primary contact and legal owner of the domain is that employee or officer as far as the registry is concerned.
This says nothing about what the employee can do with the domain -- if the registrant is a corporation or other organization, it's up to them to impose any legal requirements on the employee that are required to ensure the employee does not steal the domain or fail in their fiduciary duty to transfer the domain to an officer later designated to be the primary contact of record.
They already do, but there are a finite relatively small number of servers that they can easily rootkit, and once those are blacklisted, they're blacklisted.
It might not be perfect, but it makes things much harder, for spammers: using totally fake information and stolen CCs to register domains becomes especially hard, since they now need a fraudulent physical address they can take mail at, risks of getting caught are higher, and hosting providers can look at the contact info in WHOIS and do a better job at refusing to open accounts for contacts that have been associated with known spam domains.
The numbers of windows workstations are much larger, and the main participants in botnets which are used to host spam sites. If it were just compromised servers hosting phishing and spam sites, the spam problem would be much smaller than it is today.
There are an infinite number of throwaway domains they can register, limited only by the number of times the spammer can shell out $10; if their average spamming run nets them $100, before that domain gets blacklisted and they move on to another one, it's financially worth it to the spammer to just keep registering new domains domains.
It is more expensive to register domains on a "premium" TLD. Since fewer domains are registered on the TLDs, there will be fewer used by spammers.
Because people black list domains used by spammers; URI-based blacklists, and RHS blacklists that blacklist by domain name. Spam filters start to recognize them, in any case.
So spammers register thousands of domains at the cheapest prices available (probably using stolen cards or multiple shell companies)
It follows, that spam might be reduced, with greater costs or qualifications to register a domain.
I for one would be in favor of a "paper" requirement.
ICANN should require that every domain have a primary 'contact address' verified by the registrar that is listed in public WHOIS.
ICANN should require registrars to verify BY PAPER certified+restricted mail to each new primary contact address, which must be an address in a country the registrar does business in, and may not be a PO Box or forwarded address.
The registrant should be required to SIGN a document mailed, and send it back, before the domain can be placed in the zone. And the signature must match the signature on the mail slip.
The slip signed must include a statement agreeing to the ICANN policies, and certifying that the signer is the principal, and the address provided belongs to the principal who owns the domain, and not a proxy, agent, or designee.
And from then on, that 'contact information' can be used by the owner of THAT account to designate as the org contact for domains registered or transferred. Using a different contact for a domain, requiring going through verification again.
For a minor inconvenience, spammers could be stopped.
It would be great, but
Remember... how in the US the regulators are generally lobbied and controlled by the companies they regulate.
Remember, how the FDA has threatened General Mills, with Cheerios being classified as a drug, just because the product is marketed as something that lowers cholesterol when eaten as breakfast? Because Cheerios is seen as a threat to drug companies that make drugs for treating high cholesterol, GM may be forced to take their cereal off the market.
I fear that in reality, the big drug companies that make the inhalers would feel so threatened that they would call in favors and pay off their buddies/pet lobbyists at the FDA to declare those 'natural remedy' products a drug, clearly intended as a medical treatment, and ban the natural remedy company from marketing it.
One example, Propranolol is a beta blocker originally indicated as a heart medication. It's quite effective and very safe.
Propranolol has been approved by the FDA for at least one purpose as safe.
That's entirely different from a doctor recommending a medication or type of treatment regimen whose safety has not been validated.
There's nothing illegal about a doctor prescribing an approved drug for an off-label indication.
The risk is not being arrested -- the risk is being sued for civil damages or malpractice, based on advising a treatment that has not been formally tested, should the person claim the treatment didn't work, or should the person claim their condition worsened.
While you are correct, it might also be so simple that you can whip up an herbal extract and put it in an atomizer. I suspect that a water-based extract of some bitter herb is all that is necessary
Yes... if people self-medicate, at their own risk, some people could try that.
Their doctor/health care professional, however, would be taking so huge a legal risk to recommend or order use of a product as a medication not FDA approved for that usage, they would probably not do that
Without someone running clinical trials, there are many unknowns.
it would not only be safer for children and people in general but vastly cheaper.
Cheaper?
If it can't be patented and net drug companies billions of $$$; I doubt there will be a company to spend the millions for the research required to get "bitter-taste-based medication" through FDA approval.
Once they have the patent on the method of operation ("bitter tasting substance used to treat COPD, or bitter tasting substance used to treat asthma by stimulating lung taste receptors"), they will charge the standard markups all proprietary drugs get.
IOW -- it will probably be more expensive, or we'll probably never see a product based on that come to market that can be legally marketed as such. Just a bunch of studies that show the idea is promising.
However.... this may imply more students understand and can use the calculus when they are finished.. but fewer students understand the formalisms, and maybe cannot prove as much things that rely on calculus in mathematical terms that would withstand scrutiny, since they haven't learned about the formalisms. (?)
Surely, not being taught the formalisms is comes at some cost, that transformation of calculus instruction can't truly be lossless, or can it?
In what way? Not being flippant, I'm genuinely unsure as to what about calculus has changed in the last 50 years.
Nothing about the underlying math changed, but there are things that can change in calculus instruction -- some schools changed what parts of calculus they chose to cover, changed the breadth/depth of coverage and how they covered in it, arrangement of coverage; for example, how much mathematical rigor, and which theorems/proofs they included in their coverage; which proofs students were required to understand, what types of things undergrad calculus students are supposed to be able to prove rigorously, etc.
Now, think of how easy it is to copy digital media...how will this reduce piracy?
Because the "cost of the book" is rolled into that 'mandatory materials fee' the student has to pay to get into the class.
In other words, they pay for the cost of the book automatically, just by joining the class, there's no "opt out" method to not have or use the book -- pirating it provides them no benefit, since they are administratively required to pay money that is then used by the school to deliver them their copy.
The library argument isn't too persuasive, though, because the libraries should still have the paper version.
Didn't you hear about the new Kindle lending feature? You go to the library, presumably... load the book on the library's kindle, and share it with yourself.
The libraries ncopies of the book is decremented by one. And you just go home with the book on your eBook later.
5 days later, or within 2 hours if they suspect you of "using the library's version" when you should have bought that book, your eBook is automatically deleted and goes back to the library
That's the idea.
They already did that with new editions every year or every 6 months.
However, this will reduce the number of dead trees...
It will also reduce the number of greenbacks in students' pockets while simultaneously increasing the number of greenbacks in professors' and book publishing company executive's (and maybe eventually shareholders') pockets.
With more greenbacks they can make more, more expensive eBooks. Thus progress marches on
From a professor's point of view who is hired to publish things (and teaching is just a secondary tedious annoying job requirement), what's not to like about it?
since they typically wrote the book
Wait... force their students to buy a new version of a book they wrote, by submitting a revision to obsolete the old version?
Sounds like a conflict of interest, and unjust enrichment scam... IMO the prof. should be fired by the university if this sort of thing is ever discovered.
There should be some rule that if the professor supplies the book, they cannot require it for the course, unless they pay any cost of the book new beyond the raw per-page cost for the ink and paper, that is... any cost of the book beyond, say $0.02 a page + $0.10 for softcover or + $1 for hardcover.