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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

#131

Post by chaddeshon »

pdonis wrote: post #116
chaddeshon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Suprem…

What always strikes me when reading Court opinions is, first, that there are well reasoned, logical arguments that support both sides ; and second, that in almost every case where I've seen a marked difference in the quality of the arguments (this case is not one of them, btw--both sides' arguments seem to me to be well reasoned and logical, it basically comes down to a judgment call about interpretation and what Con…

I've noticed that as well. I think it is because whoever is writing the majority opinion has to temper the opinion to make it agreeable to a majority of the justices. Authors of minority opinions have no such restriction and can swing with full force.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#132

Post by pdonis »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #126
pdonis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't lose their 1st amendment rights simply because they are organized as a corporation. This assumes that any speech or political contribution by a corporation is automatically assented to by everyone who is associated with the corporation. Ask the employees or shareholders of a large corporation how many of them agree with using the corporation's money for the campaign contributions it makes. If people want…

I agree with this; I don't see why the New York Times should get any special privileges because it's a "journalistic organization". But that just means everybody should have to abide by the same rules; it doesn't mean the rules should allow corporations to do things with company money that many if not most of their employees and shareholders would not agree with, just because those things happen to be "speech". But t…

What can you say about the NYT that you can't say about CU?

Actually, if anything, CU would be less open to the issue I'm raising, of corporate money being expended for purposes that many or most of its shareholders do not agree with. CU was organized for the express purpose of political speech; NYT and most corporations are not. And most corporations are not even organized for the express purpose of publishing speech in general, as NYT is. That means most corporations shouldn't be able to make the same kinds of assumptions about what speech their shareholders would assent to, that the NYT can.

Every corporation in America would have added a line to its charter similar to whatever line in the NYT charter causes it to be considered an editorial publisher. If necessary, a similar line would have been added to every employment agreement signed by every corporate employee upon being hired.

Yes, you're right, in a practical sense this is what would happen. But that just underscores how broken corporate governance is now. The legal fiction of a "corporation" is abused in all manner of ways. IMO it would be better to restrict what "corporations", particularly publicly traded ones, can do with corporate money, and how broad their charters can be. But that's really a legislative fix, not a judicial one.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#133

Post by SEMW »

entropy_ wrote: post #124
SEMW wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who goes to uni in Europe (the UK), I've never had anyone wheel in a an actual cart of textbooks, but nor have I ever had a lecturer proclaim only a single textbook is acceptable. Usually they give a list of 5-10, with a few of them being recommended. Even where they clearly prefer some particular textbook, they'll still name a few alternatives. If a lecturer ever did say only a single textbook was allowed…

Well from my experience at an American university(though not in the US, so this may not apply). Some professors will assign graded homework problems by simply referencing the page/problem number of problems to solve. If you have a different book or edition then you simply cannot do the exercises. Also, as for requiring the newest edition, it's because bookshops may not have older editions in stock, so you cannot requ…

I think if any lecturers here assigned a problem set from a particular textbook (that the library didn't have enough of) without either photocopying it or putting up pdfs, conscientious students would complain to the students union about the lecturer, others just wouldn't bother doing the assignment. (Actually, in practice, tutors would just give out copies to their own tutorial group).

As someone doing a humanities subject, our textbooks don't have problem questions, they're just textbooks. But even for subjects like maths, the lecturers generally have their own set of questions rather than using textbook ones (usually with only minor changes from the ones used by whoever lectured that course last year) and put them online - e.g. http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/examples/

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#134

Post by jlgreco »

hub_ wrote: post #101
shrikant wrote: post #92

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…

That's why the content industry pushed for the DMCA and used that in the case of the DeCSS case: DMCA as a mean to protect market protection like DVD region encoding. The problem with physical books is that they can't do it. The know it, the court knows it.

Presumably however this means that buying both your DVDs and your DVD player from another region is now unambiguously legal. (IANAL)

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#135

Post by pdonis »

gwright wrote: post #125
pdonis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't lose their 1st amendment rights simply because they are organized as a corporation. This assumes that any speech or political contribution by a corporation is automatically assented to by everyone who is associated with the corporation. Ask the employees or shareholders of a large corporation how many of them agree with using the corporation's money for the campaign contributions it makes. If people want…

Freedom of association. You are free to invest or not invest in a corporation. You can be a customer or not. You can be an employee or not. The idea that a group of people (organized as a church, club, corporation, partnership, union, political party, non-profit, etc.) can only 'speak' as a group by getting every 'member' to explicitly sign a document for each and every instance of 'speech' or expenditure of money is…

Freedom of association is one thing. Making use of the legal privileges attached to "corporations" and "nonprofits" for uses way beyond the intent of those privileges is quite another. Yes, no large organization can get the explicit assent of every member to every official statement it makes. But that doesn't mean corporate management has carte blanche to do whatever they want with company money.

But, as I posted in another response in this thread, the real fix for this is legislative, to change the laws governing corporations and nonprofits to fix the huge abuses of corporate governance that go on today.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#136

Post by _delirium »

abraxasz wrote: post #105
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?

The best class I've ever taken was an intro class in statistics, in which the professor recommended... no book. He had an entire set of notes, practice problems (with extraordinarily detailed answers), and problem sets. Every year, he creates new exam problems so the old exams with answers become practice material. Honestly, his lecture notes (and all the additional material) is so vast that a student would hardly ha…

That answer is essentially, "each professor should write their own textbook", since an extensive series of notes intended to be used in a course of study, along with practice problems, is pretty much a draft textbook.

That could be an interesting solution, but is mostly practical if you already have tenure, since it is a quick way to not get tenure otherwise. If you spend your junior professorship time writing a textbook (in a field that already has many) rather than spending that time on more research and publications, tenure is unlikely. If you're tenured and have been teaching the same course for a while, on the other hand, you both have more leeway to spend your time doing that, and may have already sort of "naturally" accumulated years worth of notes from previous iterations of the course. Then it can be a good idea, and many senior professors do prefer this approach, because it lets them teach the course in a way precisely in line with how they feel the material should be taught, rather than having to buy into someone else's approach.

Universities could influence that outcome at all levels if they wished, though. Universities formally budget preparation time per course. Currently it's typical to budget quite little, because the assumption (and sometimes requirement) is that you'll be teaching using a standard text in the field. If they instead want extensive preparation to be done, along the lines of what you propose, they can: 1) budget sufficient time for it, e.g. specify that each course requires, say, 100 (or 200, or whatever) hours of preparation prior to the beginning of the semester; and 2) expect that the preparation time be used towards the budgeted end (i.e. expect extensive independent course materials to be developed for each course, in line with the amount of time budgeted).

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#137

Post by PeterisP »

dougmccune wrote: post #34
throwaway1979 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. I was from a modest family in Asia and went to high school (actually, I skipped most of high school as I studied on my own). I remember paying a few thousand rupees for a textbook. Most of these were printed on low quality paper and had soft or generic covers. I never thought that these books were cheap ... until I moved to North America. I noticed many books for my undergad costed over a hundred dol…

I'm involved in academic publishing, and this is exactly what will happen. Publishers will simply stop selling the cheaper international versions. Those cheaper prices aren't sustainable, they only exist because the investment in the book is already made up for by the US/first world market. The cheap international pricing is subsidized by the more expensive markets and the international sales don't (historically) can…

Outside USA there are more of respectable universities and professors teaching in English than inside USA, and many of the current USA textbooks already involve non-USA authors.

The rest of the world is self sufficient, especially in academical sense, and if the current publishers won't serve them well, they can and will immediately make and print own texbooks. They are definitely economically worth doing on their own (every single country is, not to mention, say India+UK together) and afterwards these local publishers will try to export them to USA at prices that would really undercut current ones - so current publishers won't want to rock the boat.

European market (for textbooks in Eglish) already uses the international versions due to lack of IP protectionism legal insanity that could prohibit mass import; but all my MBA books were stamped with a wishful statement 'not to be sold in USA/Canada' that carries no legal obligations to anyone here. There is no deficit of high quality material. There is no practical force that would make it difficult to replace any publisher wanting to raise prices here - competition is fierce, there are many alternatives for most subjects, supply is larger than demand; profs can do without the textbook publishers (if really neccessary, without ALL of them) but the textbook publishers need profs to recommend them.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#138

Post by iy56 »

EvilLook wrote: post #54
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?

First, unless you are in a very specialized field, there are surely several books that cover the topic you are lecturing. In the interest of politics have an official book, but in the interest of time offer alternatives. Your students, or the good ones, at least, will be able to use whatever book they can fit in their budget, including previous editions. Especially if you're teaching calculus. Second, if you are grad…

Having to support many different textbooks across different students is a recipe for chaos. Especially when the topic is something like calculus which can have such radically different treatments.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#139

Post by aaronwhite »

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?

Hopefully some folks have heard of Boundless now, we make free e-textbooks out of open-source / public domain content and are now used by students at half of all universities.

We have a program to help educators quickly get up to speed using our content with minimal effort

https://www.boundless.com/educators/

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#140

Post by Natsu »

rayiner wrote: post #41
freehunter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the whole point of the Supreme Court and of the balance of powers. Congress is free to pass whatever law they want, it's up to the Court to decide if the law is valid or Constitutional. If the Court thinks the law is a bad idea, they're free by all means to throw it out, that's the reason they exist.

"It's a bad idea" is a very different thing than "it's unconstitutional." It shouldn't even need to be said, but this is a mistake that is pervasive on HN.[1] There are infinite shitty ideas that are nonetheless Constitutional. The Court is empowered to throw out unconstitutional legislation. It is not empowered to throw out Constitutional legislation that happens to be a bad idea. [1] On everything from campaign fin…

It is, however, empowered to figure out how to interpret ambiguous legislation. And when more than one interpretation is possible, I don't really think it is such a bad idea to choose the more sensible option. I don't believe they've "throw[n] out" any part of the law here. Rather, they have chosen the interpretation they found more reasonable and consistent with the Constitutional prerogative of promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
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