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Anti-Piracy Patent Aims to Stop Students from Sharing Textbooks

torrentfreak.com

61–70 of 116 posts

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

#61
Well with more people increasingly dropping out of college, salaries have to come from somewhere

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.

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

#62
post #16

The patent itself doesn't stop students from sharing textbooks, it stops publishers from implementing systems to stop students from sharing textbooks without paying this guy a fee...

On the one hand, yes, it allows the inventor to impose a royalty.

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.

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

#63
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is arguing that one should pay for every previous idea that a new idea is derived from? 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…

> Who is arguing that one should pay for every previous idea that a new idea is derived from? 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 wi…

> You are limiting what can be created in the world.

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.

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

#64

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 i…

> If the artist wants money he should set up a donations account so I can pay him directly. 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;…

You completely misunderstood. I'm not justifying pirating by "pretending" the publisher is a worthless middleman. Did you not read my post? Piracy is not unethical. The fact that a middleman exists gives me more incentive to not purchase through the traditional means.

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?

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

#69
post #24

I have always thought that Universities should offer self-contained courses, with original homework and practice, specially in technical courses. Books should be considered as reference/reinforcement materials, never a requirement for anything. 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…

This is exactly the way the courses at my University (Cambridge, UK) worked. The lectures covered all relevant course material and problem sheets were given out (also available online http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/examples/).

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.

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

#70

This 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.

And if it's anything like the online book components I remember from college, calling it an "investment" is a stretch. (Because that implies that you're getting some value from it.)
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