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Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

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Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#91

Post by yew »

chaddeshon wrote: post #25

It is great that students will be able to get cheap text books. But, are we not concerned that the court seems to be throwing out a law passed by Congress in an area where the Constitution grants them explicit power to act merely because they think the law is a bad idea? Title 17 of the U. S. Code Section 602(a)(1) “Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title,…

They are 'throwing out' the law because it violates the first-sale doctrine, which has substantial legal force. The court simply has differently (and explicitly so) interpreted "under this title." Pay attention to the reference to 106 in particular.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#92

Post by shrikant »

I really liked this bit from the decision:

> Third, Wiley and the dissent claim that a nongeographical interpretation will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for publishers (and other copyright holders) to divide foreign and domestic markets. We concede that is so. A publisher may find it more difficult to charge different prices for the same book in different geographic markets. But we do not see how these facts help Wiley, for we can find no basic principle of copyright law that suggests that publishers are especially entitled to such rights.

FINALLY! Someone's finally seen what Robert Heinlein wrote in Life-Line and essentially just paraphrased it:

> There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#93

Post by dubya »

dublinben wrote: post #13
kbutler wrote: post #10

This will push textbooks more heavily toward digital distribution, where the content will be "licensed" to an individual user, without resale rights. While I applaud digital distribution, the lack of consumer rights comparable to the first sale and fair use doctrines is a large and growing problem.

The only saving grace of digital distribution of textbooks is that it (often) allows easier pirating. The availability of inexpensive used textbooks is less crucial if free PDFs are available.

The publishers are already pushing bundled grading systems with their textbook. You get the textbook and also a login key so you can submit homework and quizzes online. I don't know how widespread it is yet, but I suspect many service courses at state schools will adopt it soon.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#94

Post by chaddeshon »

SEMW wrote: post #72
chaddeshon wrote: post #25

It is great that students will be able to get cheap text books. But, are we not concerned that the court seems to be throwing out a law passed by Congress in an area where the Constitution grants them explicit power to act merely because they think the law is a bad idea? Title 17 of the U. S. Code Section 602(a)(1) “Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title,…

Having briefly skimmed the Opinion[1] (IANYAL), the heart of it was an exercise of close statutory interpretation to try and figure out exactly how s. 602 interacts with s. 109, with the majority concluding that as s. 602 refers explicitly to the s. 106 exclusive distribution right, it's subject to the same limitations as s. 106 is, including s. 109's First Sale limitation. (So s. 602 then just has the effect that th…

Thanks for that explanation. I hadn't had time to read the whole opinion. Perhaps my statement came off too harsh. I am nothing close to a lawyer, but I found the "parade of horribles" to be a little troubling. Shouldn't the Congress be the one evaluating the consequences on the law? I guess the counterargument is that those things are so horrible that we can assume that isn't what Congress meant.

When reading Supreme Court opinions, I am often blown away by the well reasoned, logical arguments, that support findings I disagree with. You can disagree, but you can't say they don't have some facts and logic to stand on.

If you've never read an actual Supreme Court opinion, I would highly encourage you to do do. The linked article here is just awful. It doesn't even provide the case name. The opinions are surprising easy to read, and flow pretty well. The language isn't difficult, and they can be surprising humorous. If you can make it through a C++ book, then you'll have no problem understanding the basics.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#95

Post by chaz »

nitrogen wrote: post #76
neilc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst offenders are the professors who write their own textbooks (even though there are dozens of better ones already available) and then use them in their courses, making money off each student. I think you are seriously overestimating the financial gains such a professor would make. I've taken several classes with profs who teach from their own textbook; the profit per book sold that a prof receives is usually…

I had an intro EE class where the professor required students to buy practically unreadable handwritten notes from the university copy center. The price breakdown on the copy center receipt: $1.50 for the copies, $8.50 for royalties to the professor . Later on I took MITx's prototype 802.11x online course, where I learned far more and managed an A. In that case the professor actually cowrote the textbook, but there w…

100 students x $8.50 is only $850/semester. Even if the class was 500 students, that's still not an overwhelming amount of money for writing a book. If you're teaching classes that large, you're probably making more money on the lecture circuit and become advisors/consultants at companies.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#96

Post by thebooktocome »

aspensmonster wrote: post #55
impendia wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a lecturer in a math department. I also despise the textbook industry. Would you please recommend what I might do, subject to severe limitations of (1) time and (2) political clout within my department?

Tell your students not to purchase whatever books the department head has been bribed into using in the coming semester. Instead, spend a few hours curating online resources that may serve as notes for students; better yet, just photocopy the handwritten notes that every mathematics teacher I've ever had seems to have for each lecture they give :-) Otherwise, Paul's Online Math Notes tackles Calculus and ODEs, and II…

> Instead, spend a few hours curating online resources that may serve as notes for students; better yet, just photocopy the handwritten notes that every mathematics teacher I've ever had seems to have for each lecture they give :-) Otherwise, Paul's Online Math Notes tackles Calculus and ODEs, and IIRC gives an intro to PDEs as well.

I recently taught a course on ODEs, and it took far more than "a few hours" to curate enough online resources to cover the curriculum. The sad truth is once you get out of calculus, the number of quality online resources for advanced mathematics decays rapidly, and the coverage gets spotty as well.

This is not to mention that those resources rarely agree on notation, which makes them more confusing to students (and therefore less helpful). There's something to be said for requiring a single edition of a single textbook, just for consistency's sake, even though that's caused all this publisher drama in the first place.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#97

Post by michael_miller »

impendia wrote: post #44
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #9

The publishers will just make sure to produce a different textbook between different regions now. Just re-order the chapters a little and re-order some questions/assignments. So even if someone ships in the foreign book it will be as useless as a previous edition. In general the whole textbook industry makes me sick. But fact is that lecturers are entirely responsible for it. The publishers can only do what the lectu…

I am a lecturer in a math department. I also despise the textbook industry. Would you please recommend what I might do, subject to severe limitations of (1) time and (2) political clout within my department?

Write up lecture notes, and design your own assignments. This is how a lot of my upper division math classes were setup, and the arrangement worked quite well. Textbooks are usually full of fluff not relevant to the class. Lecture notes, being designed by the person teaching the class, only contained material directly related to what was being lectured about / tested on. Of course, creating comprehensive lecture notes is not an easy task, but it's well worthwhile - write up your lecture notes once, and you can reuse them every year, without your students paying $100 for a textbook they'll never look at again.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#98

Post by isb »

Why can't they apply similar interpretation to legalize re-importation of drugs? The arguments there are similar ( "drugs are expensive in US to subsidize foreign markets").

This is also another blow to the academic publishing racket. In response, they might stop publishing cheap international editions. I hope the availability of high quality open source textbooks and material from MOOCs will cause the developing world to adopt them instead. However, there is a chance that pirated copies - either digital or facsimile copies of US editions - will flood the asian markets. This already happens today but at a small scale.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#99

Post by vlahmot »

chaz wrote: post #95
nitrogen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an intro EE class where the professor required students to buy practically unreadable handwritten notes from the university copy center. The price breakdown on the copy center receipt: $1.50 for the copies, $8.50 for royalties to the professor . Later on I took MITx's prototype 802.11x online course, where I learned far more and managed an A. In that case the professor actually cowrote the textbook, but there w…

100 students x $8.50 is only $850/semester. Even if the class was 500 students, that's still not an overwhelming amount of money for writing a book. If you're teaching classes that large, you're probably making more money on the lecture circuit and become advisors/consultants at companies.

So the students should pay that cost? That is absurd. The school should either pay the teacher more or lose them. The financial burden of keeping the professor there should not be placed on the students outside of their tuition.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#100

Post by megaman821 »

greenyoda wrote: post #18
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #9

The publishers will just make sure to produce a different textbook between different regions now. Just re-order the chapters a little and re-order some questions/assignments. So even if someone ships in the foreign book it will be as useless as a previous edition. In general the whole textbook industry makes me sick. But fact is that lecturers are entirely responsible for it. The publishers can only do what the lectu…

The worst offenders are the professors who write their own textbooks (even though there are dozens of better ones already available) and then use them in their courses, making money off each student. Maybe there should be conflict of interest rules in universities. The heroes in this game are the instructors who are creating open-source textbooks.

I have had several professors who taught course requiring their own textbooks. In every case though, the textbook was made available at printing cost or given away for free at a cost to the professor, since they also felt it was a conflict of interest to profit off their class requirements.

I would definitely drop a class where a professor started a semester by doing something so ethically gray.

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