How I Beat The Textbook Industry (With A Shoebox Contraption)
madebyloren.com
madebyloren.com
Here's one site: http://www.diybookscanner.org/
And here's a 2009 article about how the Google-Books scanning rig works: http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...
The activities described do break the copyright terms in the books, but as long as he didn't share them it's unlikely that anyone would go after him, and if they did it's unlikely that they would make such a high fine stick. The fine is supposed to cover the potential for lost earnings, so in this case he'd likely be looking at a fine of 2k or less. But I'm no lawyer!
The other huge benefit was that I brought just a laptop around with me to classes instead of a heavy backpack full of books.
I do not have any problems with anyone scanning their books for personel use and its legal, but this was not.
Professors routinely get kickbacks for using certain books, textbook publishers routinely publish new "editions" with limited to no changes just to obsolete books in the secondary market. They put in one-time-use keycodes that are required to make use of the book, and since they have exclusivity over their courses, there is no free market choice - students are forced to buy these absurdly expensive tomes of questionable use or cannot get an education.
The legality of this is clear, the morality here is anything but.
One commenter on the blog post:
> "Hopefully, you never write your own textbook. Looks like you found an efficient way to steal that $700 of literature. Probably slightly quicker than raising the cash by mugging or defrauding a charity, but ethically no different."
What a load of horseshit. Copyright infringement is not at all like defrauding a charity or mugging someone. Incredibly stupid analogy is incredibly stupid.
It's funny though, that when we object so hard when the MPAA/RIAA uses the word "theft" to describe infringement, but when it conveniences us we will use the same weasel word for the exact same fucking thing.
And more accurately, I think commenter meant "hopefully you're never in a position to defraud your students by forcing them to buy a book you wrote yourself and are receiving significant kickbacks for from the publisher and abusing your position as a tenured educator for unfair financial benefit", but that's a mouthful.
no the morality is clear as well, he could have done many other things to protest or just reevaluate his decision and study/do something else. instead he chose to steal and then decided to brag about it.
and having read textbooks I would not call them literature in general.
and I am sure there were cheaper/free alternative books out there that he could have made due with.
my opinion stands he is a thief with a big mouth. he is not much of a thief but still one.