Right, so let's reinforce the idea that a good education is for people who can pay for it, not for people who are smart enough to benefit from it...
Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
51–60 of 116 posts
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#52No 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 do…
I'm just sad that a professor is the one proposing this. There go my non-existent beliefs in academia.
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.
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#53Just another reason for not hiring people based on their grades.
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#54I'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 i…
>The purpose wasn't so you could get insanely wealthy off of an idea
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?
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#55This already is in widespread use, not sure how the professor expects this patent to hold up in any way. I had a 4 quarter French language requirement for my major for which I needed to purchase a $125 book, and then a $99 online fee to have access to the homework that was 20% of my grade. The real kicker? My $99 online fee only covers 12 months, 3 quarters is a calendar year without summer school, that fourth quarte…
I've had to use the Mastering Physics site. You could purchase access the the site by itself, or get it for 'free' when you bought the required textbook. Mind you, this was no bargain - buying the book was a $280 investment.
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really wouldn't mind living in a world where you can have a monopoly over ideas, if I am one of the few who can afford paying for those ideas. I would. It has much further and deeper implications in the bigger picture than just that one textbook that you could afford.
They're not trying to charge for access to the ideas. They're charging for the explanation of those ideas in text that a team of people crafted. They're charging way too much for it, but that's only because universities let them.
Exactly. The ideas are already out there. Charging for information that's out there when you have a semi-monopolistic hold on the market through the collusion of most higher institutions of education is unethical.
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#57Up-front and clear fees, directly based on the product or service offered, are the most efficient way for a market economy to work. In this case, this should mean simple fees for the classes, and book prices based on the original content in that version divided by the number of people who demand that original content.
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.
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#58Unfortunately, this is nothing new for students. 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 o…
The last college I taught at had a similar set-up for Introductory Biology with McGraw Hill's Connect software. I was very unhappy about the cost to the students, but felt obligated to make it worth points, since students who were forced to use its adaptive learning system in previous years performed better than those who weren't.
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.
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#59I'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 i…
I am not going to pay for any product I can pirate anymore. + 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…
He also wouldn't be allowed to read your comment either.
Re: Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks
#60Unfortunately, this is nothing new for students. 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 o…
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 How is that not the whole idea behind college, in general?
Technically, my outrage would be at being forced to pay to do homework on top of being forced to pay to learn.