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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

#161

Post by vilhelm_s »

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.

That's an interesting point. A major complaint about DMCA has always been that it allows copyright owners to criminalize otherwise legal acts by adding DRM. But the usual examples have always been fair use rights, like making quotations, or researchers and libraries trying to preserve historical documents. Those uses have always been "collateral damage", which the copyright owners didn't wasn't specifically interested in preventing.

But with this ruling, it is now clear that the thing that region codes aim to prevent would be completely legal except for the DMCA's circumvention provision. So in some sense, this is a much more blatant example of copyright owners writing their own laws.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#162

Post by saraid216 »

khuey wrote: post #150
saraid216 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, and I haven't studied the issue, but from what I do understand, Citizens United made a lot of sense from a strict legal perspective. That is, corporations have always been persons under the law, and they were just affirming that. The issue, really, is more that they also affirmed the usage of this detail as a loophole because they were faced with either (1) negating a crapton of case law that depended on corpo…

Corporations have not always been persons under the law.

94% of the lifetime of the law itself, and inspired by British practices, is pretty close to "always" for me.

I went looking for a history of USC Title 1 Section 1, but I couldn't find anything, and I think that numbering system was only set up in 1920 anyways.

Again, I'm not an expert in this field. I could totally be wrong. But you're going to have to be a little more convincing than "No it's not" to overrule Wikipedia.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#163

Post by smsm42 »

I feel glad and sad in the same time. Glad because first sale doctrine survived, and sad because it could very well not. The whole matter that first sale doctrine disappears as soon as you cross borders sounds ridiculous - the practice of manufacturing goods cheaply at one place and sell them in another is an extremely common practice, and there's absolutely zero reason for books to be except from it.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#164

Post by tjr »

NegativeK wrote: post #144
tjr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking university multi-variable calculus (in the US), I grew disappointed with the explanations in the prescribed textbook. They happened to be renovating the math department building that year, and some staff were dumping out old "evaluation copies" of various textbooks. I sorted through a pile of them until I found one that I liked better, and used it for the remainder of the class, doing similar problem sets to t…

Were the problem sets graded? I'm assuming that, if they were, you did both. If you didn't, what was the grader's response?

No, the problem sets weren't graded. I suppose had they been, I would have used one book to read from and the other to do problems out of!

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#165

Post by spullara »

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.

This could definitely accelerate the move to non-resaleable ebooks to the detriment of students.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#166

Post by Natsu »

rayiner wrote: post #157
Natsu wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progre…

In this specific case I don't disagree, I think they made a good and reasonable call, interpreting an ambiguous statute consistently with its other copyright jurisprudence. More generally, I'm quite wary of situations in which the Court second-guesses Congress. Every time the Court does so, it uses up some of the Court's political capital, which is ultimately the only thing the Court has to enforce its judgments. Eve…

That much, I can agree with. The devil, of course, is always in the details.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#167

Post by jlgreco »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #155
jlgreco wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm fairly certain that was always clearly legal.

Couldn't you say the same of buying books in other countries though?

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#168

Post by baddox »

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…

That's already what a lot of "new versions" of textbooks are. When I was in college studying Computer Science, students would often resell their textbooks to students from the incoming class, and whenever the department officially switched to the new version of the text, the teachers would quickly find the very small differences (slightly different page breaks, reordered problem sets, etc.) and include both versions in their assignments.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#169

Post by pdonis »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #153
pdonis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speec…

The legal fiction of a "corporation" is abused in all manner of ways. True, but I don't see how to fix it without serious unintended consequences in other areas.

Are there particular consequences you have in mind?

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#170

Post by koenigdavidmj »

sib wrote: post #29
greenyoda wrote: post #18

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. 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 had a professor who was a co-author on the textbook that we used in his class. It was the "standard" work in the field, so it would have been ridiculous to use a different one. Nonetheless, he acknowledged the potential conflict, gave us an accounting of his earnings per copy (well under a dollar per), and bought food for the class out of his own pocket. Good solution, I thought.

Tadayoshi Kohno at UW?
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