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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

#181

Post by jacoblyles »

akiselev wrote: post #80
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…

I only mentioned the Citizens United case because it's popularly reviled. I see no problem with the ruling as far as precedent goes (although I have qualms about the general rights without responsibilities that corps get) and I don't think it has really changed that much. Except... the commercials seem to get more and more interesting. The SCOTUS certainly has an idealogical split (as in conservative vs liberal) but…

It is only "popularly reviled" among leftists because the Citizens United non-profit corporation was producing right-wing speech. For my part, I agree with the ACLU that the decision was a resounding victory for free speech.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#182

Post by driverdan »

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 had a professor who wrote one of the books used in his course. It was sold at cost and he complained about the price (something like $15), wishing he could decrease it.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#183

Post by Shinkei »

antiterra wrote: post #74

The case involves textbooks, but it's not really about textbooks. Instead it's about what "made lawfully under this title" means in the context of first-sale of physical items. Under one interpretation, if you buy a book outside the US, your ability to resell it in the US without permission depends on whether or not the book was made in the United States. Under the other interpretation, "lawfully made under this titl…

Great analysis... so would you say this is generalizable to region coding issues? Because first-sale doctrine should protect my ability to buy a DVD in China and use it/sell it in the US. Would region-free players also be protected?

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#184

Post by pdonis »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #173
pdonis wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there particular consequences you have in mind?

Yes, you still haven't explained how to suppress Monsanto's political speech while preserving that of the New York Times. The idea that a corporation must be organized for an "express purpose," declared in advance, that will determine that corporation's rights relative to others, is troublesome to put it mildly. A government that enforces things like that WILL enforce things that you and I don't like as well.

you still haven't explained how to suppress Monsanto's political speech while preserving that of the New York Times.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough. I'm not talking about suppressing corporations' political speech specifically. I'm talking generally about corporations not being able to use company money for purposes not agreed to by a majority of shareholders. A corporation like NYT (or CU, for that matter), which is organized specifically for the purpose of publishing speech, is in a different position in that regard from a corporation which is organized to sell people crop seeds.

The idea that a corporation must be organized for an "express purpose," declared in advance, that will determine that corporation's rights relative to others, is troublesome to put it mildly. A government that enforces things like that WILL enforce things that you and I don't like as well.

The government is what gives corporations their legal privileges in the first place. Without the government, a corporation is just a bunch of people. It's government that allows corporations to shield their shareholders and officers from personal liability, take advantage of tax deductions for business expenses, etc.

I should make clear, btw, that I am not advocating removing all the aspects of corporations as legal persons. There are a lot of aspects of that that are very useful; for example, allowing corporations to enter into contracts and other legal agreements. I just don't think that automatically means that corporations must have all the aspects of legal persons, which is the underlying assumption behind the claim that corporations somehow automatically have free speech and other rights simply because they're legal persons.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#185

Post by sk5t »

spullara wrote: post #165
hub_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's my hope that people will continue to find, as I do, that reading books on a screen is a huge handicap to absorbing the material effectively.

Programming exercises and whatnot are fine and dandy on a glowing screen, but despite working on computers since 8 years old, my brain demands non-glowing, ink-on-pulp copies for deep thought. Surely I'm not the only one?

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#186

Post by RougeFemme »

sk5t wrote: post #185
spullara wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's my hope that people will continue to find, as I do, that reading books on a screen is a huge handicap to absorbing the material effectively. Programming exercises and whatnot are fine and dandy on a glowing screen, but despite working on computers since 8 years old, my brain demands non-glowing, ink-on-pulp copies for deep thought. Surely I'm not the only one?

No, you're not. I spent the past week helping someone with statistics. As she clicked back-and-forth between her e-book and online homework, I flipped back-and-forth through her hardcopy book, refreshing my memory and guiding her through her homework.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#187

Post by wmil »

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…

There's a much simpler way. Use the health code.

Include a useless, but harmless, insecticide in the paper of international editions to "fight bookworms". Then lobby to get insecticide books banned domestically due to "potential health risks".

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#188

Post by antiterra »

Shinkei wrote: post #183
antiterra wrote: post #74

The case involves textbooks, but it's not really about textbooks. Instead it's about what "made lawfully under this title" means in the context of first-sale of physical items. Under one interpretation, if you buy a book outside the US, your ability to resell it in the US without permission depends on whether or not the book was made in the United States. Under the other interpretation, "lawfully made under this titl…

Great analysis... so would you say this is generalizable to region coding issues? Because first-sale doctrine should protect my ability to buy a DVD in China and use it/sell it in the US. Would region-free players also be protected?

You've gone a bit too far with the scope. This is about legitimately produced physical manifestations of works protected under copyright. Your average toaster is likely not protected by copyright, but if the toaster company engraves a poem onto the side, suddenly it may be.

It's also only about the exhaustion of the distribution right of the specific item that was purchased. It has nothing to do with a right to copy or circumvent access/copy protection etc.

Therefore, region free players have nothing to do with this whatsoever, unless, perhaps, they have a copyrighted work painted on them or something.

As for DVDs: Theoretically, if you managed to find a legitimately produced DVD in China (made with the rights holder's permission) you could bring it back to the US and sell it.

Whether or not you can legally play that DVD in the US on any particular player is an entirely different and more involved question involving a bunch of DMCA caselaw.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#189

Post by khuey »

saraid216 wrote: post #162
khuey wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Wikip…

The modern understanding of corporate personhood (that "equal protection of the laws" applies to non-natural persons) is generally dated to Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company in 1888.

I don't know where "94% of the lifetime of the law itself" and "inspired by British practices" come from, so I can't really dispute those.

Re: Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks

#190

Post by saraid216 »

thedufer wrote: post #62
HarryHirsch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publishers are merely exploiting the highly school-like nature of university education in the US. When I was in university, over in Europe, a long time ago, on the first day of lectures the professors would wheel in a cart of textbooks, saying these are suitable texts, go and pick the one that suits you best. But in the US, students demand that their education is like high school, with a set text and all, and if the…

> students demand What? I've never heard this particular demand (and I just graduated from a US college). Sure, students might complain about having the wrong edition - but only when lecturers assign work by page number, so that it becomes impossible to do it with the wrong edition. Do you have any evidence that this is the students' fault?

Effectively, it was an era before your generation.

This is largely speculation, but it's the conclusion I've drawn from my experience in community college (my university experience was more specialized and used effectively no textbooks):

Students very often saw themselves as customers to a university, and the consumerist mindset of always being right was unfortunately brought along with this. If they got something wrong, they didn't accept blame for that: they'd push it off onto the TA or onto the professor. One easy vector for that was to blame it on the particular variation of book they had used, so professors started moving towards simply mandating a single golden text and teaching directly out of it.

I got the sense that a huge part of it was because the faculty had gotten together and agreed on this solution as the simplest one; it was particularly palpable in cases where the professor was dismissive of and disgusted by the mandated textbook.

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