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Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks

#2
I'm tired of this. I am not going to pay for any product I can pirate anymore. I don't even feel guilty about it. If the artist wants money he should set up a donations account so I can pay him directly. I'm tired of these middlemen.

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.

Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks

#5
post #3

That's an approach... Open source textbooks are another: http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/CNP3

    Students who don’t pay can’t participate in the course and therefore get a lower grade.
The patent kind of forces students to buy the material.

Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks

#6
I'm somewhat confused as to how this would work. Surely the university is responsible for awarding the degree and academic staff choose a supporting textbook to help students? So I assume universities wanting to use a textbook don't have to adopt the system.

Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks

#7
I really wouldn't mind paying for a textbook access code for every class I take, if the price was actually reasonable (unlike new textbook prices). In an ideal world: go around the print publishers and digitally publish books with an access code at a low price with nearly all proceeds going to the author.

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.

Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks

#8

I'm somewhat confused as to how this would work. Surely the university is responsible for awarding the degree and academic staff choose a supporting textbook to help students? So I assume universities wanting to use a textbook don't have to adopt the system.

The guy is a Professor and publishes textbooks. My guess is that he wants a way to force his own students to buy his book instead of copying it.

Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks

#9

    No access code means a lower grade, all in the best interests of science.
I ... no. I can't even...

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.

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