Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
No access code means a lower grade, all in the best interests of science.
I'm sorry, but I find it very hard to summon an inkling of sympathy for the publishers' plea against piracy when I see measures like that.
When I failed calculus because I didn't prove a theorem the way it was in the lecture notes and then was insane enough to argue the point, I thought it was pretty stupid. Here, I don't think the word even begins to describe the situation.
Commodity. That's a good way of describing the role of the students. It shows a rather alarming failure of the system that instead of incentivizing the pursuit of knowledge, students are set up for failure and milked for as much money as possible during their education.
I know a patent doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, and I do hope that most people in a position to make decisions in education call it out for being stupid, though I feel that's a tad optimistic. I'm just sad that a professor is the one proposing this. There go my non-existent beliefs in academia.
This patent might work in areas of the world that don't have much consumer protection, but they will NOT work in areas of the world that care about anti-competitive practices.
Still, I agree completely.
In addition to heartily endorsing planetguy's comment (as a university professor), I might point out that this guy doesn't speak for the publishing industry either.
He is just some random asshole who managed to game the patent system.
Most textbooks are written by professors. Or to put it another way, a tiny minority of professors write textbooks. This particular asshole appears to be a textbook-writing professor in a fifth-rate university (University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, anybody?) who writes things with bullshit-sounding titles like Amazonia in the Arts: Ecocriticism versus the Economics of Deforestation.
The vast majority of professors, of course, don't give a whit about increasing royalties for their textbook-writing brethren. While there's a few good textbooks which are worth having, I'd certainly never go out of my way to make sure that my students actually need to own the textbook in order to pass the course; that's just stupid.
Yep, sounds like that teacher: the one who writes awful textbooks and mandates those books for his courses, shitting a new one every year to ensure a steady income stream.
I'm also tired of people preaching about how piracy is unethical. A copied piece of data is not equivalent to a lost sale. People cannot own information. You cannot own an algorithm or idea. Imagine if Newton owned the laws of motion, imagine if he owned calculus. How can someone own an arrangement of words or sounds. If you think piracy is unethical you are either a dolt or benefiting from current copyright and patent laws.
edit: And let us not forget the primary purpose of these laws. The purpose wasn't so you could get insanely wealthy off of an idea. It was to provide an incentive for people to create and learn. Copyright and patent laws are now doing the opposite.
People used to think freeing someone's slave was unethical property theft as well. As soon as the economic interest shift, so does the mainstream ethics. Same will happen to piracy, as soon as authors cannot make money off copyright and patents. Then it's the monopoly of ideas that will become unethical, and not the other way around.
1. If a musician doesn't want to have publishers taking a cut of the revenue from their music they are free to not have a publisher involved.
2. If a musician wants to distribute their music for free or have a pay what you want system they can.
If a musician chooses to use a publisher or big label then you should respect that; pretending that a publisher is a worthless middleman and using it to justify pirating media is laughable. If the publisher was worthless then the musician would not be using them, would they?
Do you really think people like Rihanna and One Direction wish they could set up a bandcamp account and get rid of the publishers? Of course not because publishers provide real tangible value.
Either respect the wishes of the musician by consuming through official channels or just pirate it, don't pretend you're a noble person by wanting to "donate" to the musician directly, if the musician wanted that they would not have a label involved.
Piracy is not unethical. It's not wrong. It's not stealing. If the musician wants to own the content they should simply not release it. I could care less about "respecting" the musician. Why should I pay money for low quality content when I could download the flac version for free without drm?
Why would any content creator (except, of course, producers of software, they laugh at you from their SaaS cloud) want to create anything if a pompous and self-righteous "respecting" in quotes is the spit in the face?
Or could you care less? If so, why do you consider payment-or-not-download not an option? (hint: "because I can" was already answered but not considered satisfactory)
When it's the supreme court repeating it, that certainly make it true. [1]
> Why would any content creator (except, of course, producers of software, they laugh at you from their SaaS cloud) want to create anything if a pompous and self-righteous "respecting" in quotes is the spit in the face?
For the same reason humans have been creating art since much before the existence of copyright? The notion that we can attribute as "property" on something not tangible only appeared recently in human history [2]. While we have been creating art for much longer.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)
[2] Before UK monarchy started granting monopoly privilege on printed books. The common notion among humans was that knowledge cannot be owned.
8 centuries ago, Piers_Plowman said “Human intelligence is like water, air and fire – it cannot be bought or sold;”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Plowman
2.5k years ago, Heraclitus said "the logos is common to all".
Plenty of music is released for free, many photographers are happy just to have someone see their work, and lots of software is written with very permissive licenses.
Remember, the entire point of copyright is to benefit society by having more works available to the public. That's it. I don't believe it's proven that we need strong (or any?) copyright in order for this to happen.
And you can't copyright them either.
How can someone own an arrangement of words or sounds.
Because that person made it? Are you saying people have no right to own the things they make?
"I can only see so far because I'm standing in the shoulder of giants."
Imagine if you had to pay for every one of the thousands little concept that your own idea (inevitably) derives from. That system would be unsustainable. We can only make progress because we can expand and improve on what were created before.
That's a straw man.
The argument for paying people for new IP is that for a limited time we should offer rewards for people to add to the collective knowledge of our society.
So really in terms of your argument, the consumer isn't paying for "standing on the shoulder of giants" either. The consumer of IP is only paying for the incremental value added by the creator of the content.
As a society, we discovered that rewarding producers adds to the useful aggregate more than just hoping that they'll add the same amount of content without compensation.
IP limits production to create artificial scarcity. No matter how you look at it, after you copyright or patent something. You are limiting what can be created in the world.
> As a society, we discovered that rewarding producers adds to the useful aggregate more than just hoping that they'll add the same amount of content without compensation
No we did not. Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy. [1] Together with the monopoly selling rice, and other commodities, were the monopoly of printing books. At no point in history did we, as a society, conclude that if we limit reward producers it would add to the useful aggregate. That excuse was only invented after the "monopoly privilege" over copying books were renamed to "copy rights". At the same time that other monarchy monopolies were destroyed.
Society never discovered that it's worth in the aggregate. You cannot prove it's worth in the aggregate. Any attempt so far to measure the aggregate has been absurd. [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law
[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html
Not really true. You could say that IP limits some forms of use that could produce new creations. But that would ignore the fact that often IP is licensed, thus not preventing the creation of some content.
Further, providing a reward for the creation of new IP dramatically increases the overall creation rate of what society considers to be "useful" IP.
> No we did not. Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy
That's just an ad hominem.
> At no point in history did we, as a society, conclude that if we limit reward producers it would add to the useful aggregate.
See, this is just factually incorrect. All you need to do is to look at US history and the motivations for creating copyright and patent law as part of the new nation to see that you're wrong.
The saddest thing is that I actually think that our system of IP is in serious need of a rewrite. The way that big media companies abuse our legal system and the power of our government should be criminalized. At very least, we should be using statistical models and the Scientific method to determine the ideal values for copyright and patent lengths rather than basing new IP laws upon the lobbying efforts of Disney.
That said, as an advocate for changing the situation, you're not being effective. You make totally unfounded arguments and in at least one other place in this same thread I saw where you were using cheap online debating tricks to try to get your point across.
When I read the original article this thread is based on, I felt some legitimate annoyance at the professor since what he's doing is unethical. But then I read a couple of your posts and felt I needed to respond to arguments that were remarkably uninformed and disingenuously constructed.
No it isn't....
So, yeah, it is an ad hominem.
In this case, he is referring to a third party (the monarchy) who actually did use it as a monopoly priviledge for the monarchy. Saying that it is frabricated does not make it so. In fact, if you look at all that was said, it was "Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy."
Which is what the poster did in bringing up the motivations of a monarchy that used some form of IP regulation that we weren't even discussing. Discrediting monarchies' motivations for wanting IP has nothing to do with the situation we have today. It's an ad hominem.
None of that has anything to do with the utility of reward-based IP laws in promoting the creation of useful IP to society. So you could also consider some argument about how monarchies used IP in medieval times to be a red herring. Regardless of the label, the argument is equally invalid.
Oh, I don't know. The USPTO?
The USPTO is certainly NOT arguing that when you pay for IP you also must pay something for everything that the IP is built upon.
So here is where I perhaps get a little confused. Is this allowed? If you can't refine an idea, then this restricts innovation. If I can refine the idea and then patent it, does this mean that any license costs must go only to me? Or do I have to pay a portion of these license costs to the original patent I have derived my ideas from?
Option 1: Can't refine a patent. Result: restriction of innovation and trade.
Option 2: You can refine a patent, but don't have have to license this to the original patent author. Result: you can bypass patents. The whole system becomes pointless.
Option 3: You can refine a patent, but you must pay part of the license you charge to the original patentee. Result: Costs increase for each patent license.
I made a joke about that one guy being fat. Whenever someoness tells my joke or some along that line he should pay me because I did it.
The middlemen play an important role in some industries. Many people ask cstross why he doesn't have a donation link so that people who've read a pirate version of one of his books can pay him. He is very clear - he wants you to buy a book of his (any book) so that his publisher can get some of the cash as well. Books need to be written, edited, typeset, 'printed' / 'put into ebook format', distributed, etc.
Some of this could be taken away from the middlemen. Kindles could have a "highlight typo / highlight grammar error" mode, which sends possible corrections to the publisher who reviews, then corrects them, and they get updated on the device.
I've never trawled through a slush pile. But having seen some of the rubbish that comes out the end I dread to think what goes in the other end.
> If you think piracy is unethical you are either a dolt or benefiting from current copyright and patent laws.
I am happy to pirate a lot of content. But I try hard to pay for everything I pirate. Sometimes that's not possible (out of print book, no longer distributed video, etc.) There are lots of things about content distribution that really suck. But I do try to pay for my content.
It is wrong to suggest that wanting to pay people for the work they do is something that only a dolt would do.
The author writes the book. Typesetting and "putting into ebook format" are a copy-and-paste affair, taking at most a day. Pirated books don't need to be printed or distributed.
Well, if you want it done poorly, sure. (And of course, you rightly avoided impugning the need for a good editor.)
To be clear, if more than one person buys the book, then the time and effort will have been repaid by more than one person. The analogy I provided doesn't actually fall down - if several people go to the cobbler to have their shoes repaired, more the good for the cobbler!
So yes, I only would pay once for the time and effort of the publisher for that book. I might buy more books from the publisher, but then that is different content.
I'm not following your reasoning as to why I or anyone else should pay the publisher more than once for the same product. Could you clarify?
Ahh, I kind of misunderstood. I got on some odd tangent about software in general (i've been arguing a piracy thread on another board recently and got the two conflated in my mind) and forgot that this was a thread about textbook shenaniganery.
Still, I rather dislike physical analogies to digital things as they're usually terribly flawed in one way or another. There is at least an argument (if not a very good or reasonable one) on the whole textbook licensing thing. There is no reasonable argument in any universe real or imagined where cobbler would charge you per step. It's reductio ad absurdum.
Edit: OMG, I really did write "every step I take"! That was a total brain fart, and not in any way what I meant to say. I have no idea why I wrote that :( A little embarassed now!
I wrote a bit about it here: http://zacharyalberico.com/post/16427595132/no-infringement-...
Agreed, although getting wealthy off an idea isn't inherently unethical either.
> provide an incentive for people to create and learn.
Agreed. Rewarding people for adding "useful" pieces to societies knowledge base should be rewarded.
> Copyright and patent laws are now doing the opposite.
In the aggregate? I don't think so. The professor in the linked article for this thread is obviously doing the opposite. In undergraduate academia, 95% (made up number) of the actual knowledge in the materials being used to educate are or should be in the public domain.
The fact that the market for calculus books didn't completely collapse with the advent of the laptop (let alone the ipad) is a sign that there's a deliberate effort in the academic world to force students to pay for intellectual property that has no value beyond what is already freely available elsewhere.
But to generalize and claim that all copyright and patent laws are doing more harm than good is specious. Are you saying we should get rid of all IP protections? Completely?
+
A copied piece of data is not equivalent to a lost sale
uhh huh?
Why not just declare that you're not going to look at anything that's subject to copyright any more? That way you can avoid paying those evil royalties to the people who create artwork, and nobody can say you're wrong.
Don't watch TV, don't listen to music, don't read any book published after [whatever the cutoff date is] and don't play video games. Sounds like that's what will make you happy.
I have been forced to buy institution specific versions of my books (which simply means they regenerated the practice problems), preventing me from seeking cheaper bookstores like Amazon or the mom & pop down the street. I have been forced to purchase physical CD's with serial codes to access lecture notes (of course, only provided at the school bookstore). But worst of all, I'm very often forced to purchase WebAssign keys. Web Assign is a service that allows professors (in my case, in the math/physics departments) to create online quizzes and homeworks that are graded automatically. Usually the keys cost $45-$60 and they only work for one semester per class, and while they come free with new books (which are exorbitantly expensive, might I add) any used book purchase must be supplemented with these keys. Of course, the professor is glad to tell us we have the option not to buy the key, however we will then get a 0 on the respective assignments.
In my very humble opinion, the greed has gotten so out of control that it's hard for the publishers to see what is even wrong with forcing students to PAY TO DO HOMEWORK.
Something desperately needs to be done. My hope is that e-books slowly democratize the process, but that could be long after I have graduated.
How is that not the whole idea behind college, in general?
I really wish there was a free or open-source adaptive learning system for biology courses, in the same way that the Khan Academy has one for learning math.
Richard Stallman, Right to Read, 1997. It's really chilling to read this story today, when half of it is already truth.
What seemed absurd back in 1997 is more and more probable today.
This patent describes a means to make the prices of things -- like a class -- much more obscure and indirect, which is obviously a perverse market. It's not really about piracy though; it more closely resembles a toll booth on the door to the classroom, or charging students to keep the lights on so they can read the chalkboard. This just happens to resemble a copyright issue, so it triggers that particular response from people interested in copyright.
So why are such perverse systems so common? Because we demand them. It's not some conspiracy. We like to play games with prices, and overestimate our ability to outplay our opponent, and think we can get the best of them (in reality, practical matters take over and we just end up paying more on average).
Take cellphones. You can buy an unlocked google phone for a simple, direct price based on the quality of the hardware and the support that you expect to receive from google (or the manufacturer). Then, you can get a prepaid service plan for cheap (I pay $30/mo for a good smartphone plan) that is based on the level of service you expect from the carrier for as long as you feel like being their customer. I will save hundreds per year over getting a contract and a discounted phone (let's say a typical smartphone plan is at least $60/mo, so I save $30/mo or $720 over a 2-year contract, but lose at most $400 from lack of a discount, netting me $320). I also have greater flexibility and choice.
Yet almost everybody in the U.S., including those reading this comment, are under a 2-year contract right now. Why? I don't know. Economics is about what people actually do though, not what they should do. And given a choice between clear pricing and obscure pricing, people choose obscure pricing.
EDIT: And after people get predictably tired playing pricing games with a large company, and end up just paying more, they complain.
Besides the psychological barriers to putting down an extra couple hundred to save a little money every month (where only in the aggregate do you start coming ahead), many of us just can't afford to drop that much cash at once for a phone. Not only that, but many have families, making that very expensive very quickly.
Speaking of families, prepaid doesn't cater well to families either! For most carriers, you can add a line for what, $10 a month (I use T-Mobile)? In my family of 4, a family plan would cost around $100 to $110 (without data).
The cheapest prepaid plans are now around $30 so a family of 4 would cost $120. Granted, that would include data, which I don't have. But with a contract plan, I would also get unlimited calling to others on the same carrier and free calling at night. Many Americans still actually use their phones as phones, so that's a huge plus that prepaid carriers don't offer.
So while prepaid works for many, it still isn't the perfect solution for a large majority of us.
One sidenote: If you're on T-Mobile, you can wait for phones to go on sale for free after 2 year contract and then get the cheapest data plan ($10 a month for 200mb) and your cost of the smartphone comes out to $240 over two years. Yes, if you HADN'T gone with the subsidy and brought your own phone (not to prepaid, but the other option T-Mobile has), your plan would be $10 less per month, but if you have a family, the benefits stated above quickly make that $10 feel a lot weaker. PM me if you don't quite understand.
My physics classes also do something similar through the "masteringphysics.com" website I believe.
This is nothing new, and it's brutal for students. I can usually get through a quarter with 4-6 classes for under $100 in book costs if I buy used, old editions, etc but once a teacher throws one of these online requirements my way the costs of a quarter skyrocket to unreasonable levels.
If a teacher can't get you through a course by his or her own teaching, then they aren't worth it. You're only supposed to need those extra course packs if you're planning on skipping classes.
This is RMS prophecy coming to be and a lesson for me to always listen to crazy talk coming from well-bearded men.
It's all about purchasing power, folks. You knowledge only matters a little. Please, do pirate books. For crying out loud, knowledge can and should be pirated if it cannot be afforded.
On the other hand, the whole point of a patent is to spread the idea. A patent has to provide enough information to replicate the invention yourself.
So now publishers just have to license the patent; before this, they would have had to come up with a system like this themselves.
Once again, it seems like all it's going to do is make legitimate customers jump through hoops, while the pirates find loopholes or simply fail... neither of which results in additional revenue for publishers.
By the way, as someone unfamiliar with this sort of patent, is there some legal meaning to the constant reference to "a plurality of lines of code" when detailing the mechanics of the software, or is the author just fond of the term 'plurality'? (He also refers later to a plurality of teachers and students working together.)
I have teachers that won't actually use textbooks because kids at my school cannot afford them. Professors will actually photocopy the material for us.
I would. It has much further and deeper implications in the bigger picture than just that one textbook that you could afford.
Could you please avoid that tactic here?
Thanks.
After the irruption of Coursera and Udacity, I heard a couple of professors in my university talking about the impact those courses can have in the future. They saw themselves in the future as TAs of those courses, where the students only "use" them to clarify concepts.
Oh, right, there isn't one. There hasn't been for some years now, but the academia has had neither internal nor external incentives to innovate. Some might say giving the students the best possible experience should be an intrinsic motivation for professors. A shame it doesn't work that way.
I think though that TAs in Coursera/Udacity are not active enough. Given that tens of thousands (hundreds?) take a course, they can't afford to be. It makes me think that this model is not sustainable either.
I mean, in our day and age, dabbling in an area of science/art should not be a hard or expensive thing to do. And if you're willing to find your own information, it mostly isn't. But if everyone wanted to dabble in computer science and learn some basics, there just aren't enough TAs in the world to provide assistance.
There certainly would be enough learners, though! And I think that's a much more sustainable model. Udacity and Coursera both have active forums, I've heard Salman Khan mention it, and even in that "Intoduction to AI class" that did not have discussion forums from the start, people organized study groups, forums and subreddits all on their own.
Let's make it "cool" to study together and help others. Social routines will do the rest.
Each course had a short list of recommended books and usually the lecturer would give a few comments about each book at the start of the course. These were for supplementary reference and were widely available in the libraries. I bought one text book during my course for my favourite area, so I could keep it after University. Otherwise the libraries were completely adequate.
I studied maths, I know that computer science and physics were the same. With arts subjects students used so many books that it wouldn't be reasonable to by them. I am not aware of any courses having required textbooks but I don't know for certain.
Students who don’t pay can’t participate in the course and therefore get a lower grade.
When they're not available, because the lecturer did not author a workbook, we'd have to buy a $150-$250 textbook. I really hate it when the lecturer of Finance 1 and the lecturer of Finance 2 use different textbooks, even though one of the textbooks already have content of both of the courses. Luckily our library has a section full of textbooks with daily usage time limit of 2 hours. That means they're usually available when I go in to use one for homework - I don't even need to carry it with me...
Which university do you go to?
This has been going on for years in many institutions, he has just managed to make it legal.
Instead of limiting his works to his classroom only, i think he will make more profit on his work if he pushed sales and adoption of his books in other institutions, to other professors/lecturers, even than he can ever make charging a class of +/-100 excessively. And forget about the stupid patent.
The main confusion comes in when you realise: Hey he's an economics professor, you'd think he'll understand business better.
Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read"
I find myself wanting to post this link more and more frequently these days.
Then why on earth do you not also pay for the use of a book?
Sorry maffias, can't fight against progress.
Isn't that called tuition?
I've already participated in classes where an online code was required to access the publisher's homework... same idea really.