Copyright, knowledge and the Net
p2pnet.net News:- Knowledge isn’t free, at least, not as far as publishers are concerned, and they’re having trouble with students and younger school faculty members raised on free online content.
Professors post long clips of "protected texts" without permission, costing publishers a pretty penny, says the Copyright Clearance Center, which collects royalties from more than 1,000 universities on behalf of publishers.
Online excerpts cost the industry at least $20 million a year, continues The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, going on:
"Professors are making material available free rather than requiring students to buy $100 textbooks. While faculty members from Harvard University to the University of Pennsylvania complain of a restricted flow of ideas, publishers say they must protect $3.35 billion in annual U.S. college textbook sales."
In September, Cornell became the first school to respond to publishers, "by agreeing that legal guidelines for printing copyrighted material should apply to Web use, according to Vice Provost John Siliciano," says the story.
The agreement followed a lawsuit threat from the Association of American Publishers.
But copyright law doesn’t quantify where "fair use" ends and where a violation begins, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has Kenneth Crews, a law professor at Indiana University and director of its Copyright Management Center in Indianapolis, saying.
Does that look familiar?
"These situations are filled with conflicts and dilemma," Crews says. "One is just understanding the definition of ‘fair use.’ It’s an inherently flexible doctrine. It can be interpreted differently by different courts under the same circumstances."
College libraries used to hold certain hard copies of a book in reserve to provide access to students in a particular course, the story says, but now, "electronic reserves let the library scan and post parts of works on an internal Web site for students using pass codes that expire at the course’s end."
Rising textbook prices, "are fueling Internet use in courses," adds The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
"U.S. college students spent an average of $898 on books and supplies in the 2003- 04 academic year, and textbook prices have climbed an average of 6 percent each year since the 1987-88 academic year."
Also See:
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer – Professors get ‘F’ in copyright protection knowledge, November 20, 2006
Reuters – Adobe could still sue Microsoft – CEO in paper, November 18, 2006
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November 21st, 2006 at 6:39 pm
“Professors are making material available free rather than requiring students to buy $100 textbooks”.
Gee, maybe if the friggin’ text books didn’t cost so much the profs would be more likely to just have the students buy them. I’m not against companies making a profit, but this “we own a few bits of intellectual property so you all must make us and our stockholders filthy rich” mentality is going to topple the whole house of cards. It is totally out of control. A reasonable interpretation of fair use would help a lot, but that would just anger the copyright “owners”, then they would fire off even more lawsuits and crank up the greazy lobbying money machine.
November 21st, 2006 at 7:57 pm
“U.S. college students spent an average of $898 on books and supplies in the 2003- 04 academic year, and textbook prices have climbed an average of 6 percent each year since the 1987-88 academic year.”
Why not fit everything on a laptop or a dvd disk and save 90 percent of the cost and millions of trees?
Here we see the myth that capitalism promotes efficiency and best costs and options.
November 21st, 2006 at 8:09 pm
I don’t think I hear anything in here about the attempts by the publishers to eliminate the used book market. Strange how that is left out in this little tirade.
Every year or so, the publishers reprint the books. The main change in those reprints is the page numbers. Now why is that? Just so the professor can’t do the usual with all students and tell them to go to page such and such. When that is the only major change, you know what is up. It eliminates the student that would pay a fraction of the the new book price.
While the publishers are worried about their profits, it puts blinders on them about when they were a student. Students are not known to be filthy rich, they are known to be people that are learning to cope with the world of adults and to get something that will in turn render them a job in the work force. However, that income is future income and not one they possess today at a time when the publishers are wanting to kill the golden goose for short term profit.
A 6% per year increase? That’s obscene any publisher should want this sort of increase year after year. At some point you reach the limit and the increase is one of diminishing returns. It has reached that point with the colleges and that is one of the main reasons professors are taking exerts from text. Their courses do not require the full text of the book. In otherwords the text book they refer to does not cover the breadth of their course. Of course the publishers answer is buy more books. Students have to look at them and say, “With what money?” $100 dollar books (and certainly that isn’t the only price these sort of texts carry) is outrageous. Walk into any book store for a novel and you won’t find those sort of prices on them. So why is it you can walk into any college book store across the nation and find those prices? Simply this is another ugly face of what monopoly does to the customer; it is price gouging plain and simple.
Just as with that other monopoly, media entertainment, these folks think that just because they printed the books they are due income. As another mentioned elsewhere, that isn’t the only source of books to be had for education. When you get prices high enough, Joe Public looks elsewhere and that is just what they are doing. The publishers have nearly killed the golden goose and now they are complaining that the pickings are slim.
Sorry, no sympathy here.
November 21st, 2006 at 11:41 pm
I recently went to the Wiley publishing company’s website in order to purchase an e-book called “The Definitive Guide to How Computers Do Math.” In doing so, I was wincing at the probability of having to pay $5 for the download (I would have been happy to pay $2). I figured, “What the hell, I might as well pony up anyway.” Boy was I shocked when I saw the price was over $35!!! I ended up getting the book anyway. However, I got the book free after spending about an hour searching the p2p networks and various websites. By charging over 17 times what I would have been happy to pay, Wiley lost a sale, and I got what I wanted. Even if I could not have found the e-book free, I was NOT going to pay $35. If I were in dore straits for the information, I would have gone to the library.
Do I consider what I did to be stealing? No I do not. I considered what I done to be copyright infringement. If copyright laws were written to be fair to everyone including users as well as owners, infringement would probably be a only minor problem. However content owners have paid hansomely for laws that allow them to gouge buyers. Thanks to computers, we no longer have to put up with being forced to pay exorbitant prices for a few bits of knowlege. We the (little) people are fighting the war of information independence, and we are winning. While those in power generally use weapons, military and police to maintain control of the populations. We the people are taking a higher route to regain freedom. We are simply ignoring the cartel-government offerings and choosing to get our information elsewhere.
People are showing the software and media cartels who is boss, and it is not the cartels! Thanks to computer networks such as the Internet, average people are able to publish news items, stories, entertainment, and software to the entire world. No longer do the media cartels get to decide who gets seen and heard and who gets squelched. That power is out of their hands. The masses in Eastern Europe gottired of repressive regimes. They did not in most cases have access to weapons. However they did in mass numbers defy the oppresive regimes, and these regimes lost credibility and power. This same thing is happening to both the media and software cartels.
Now when a cop beats someone up of bullys a citizen, the cop can now be place under the scrutiny of the entire world. A video of police brutality or misconduct shown to the entire world cannot be just swept under the rug allowing the cop to get away with his or her crime. Now, in one form or another cops and other government-corporate officials are being held accountable for their actions. Many talented musicians have worked hard to get noticed by the labels. Most, however do not wind up rich nor famous. Now, these musicians can reach the entire world.
The same goes for “starving actors.” Their success is no longer determined by media giants, but rather by their talent. When what they do is like by enough people, information about their website or other distribution method will be advertised to friends and family of fans via email, IM or other forms of communication. This is the concept behind viral marketing.
Media companies are running scared now that they see their monopoly slipping away. Many of these media companies are working with Internet providers to provide preferential transfer rate for their content. In other words, providers who cannot afford the “preferential transfer rates” will find that the distribution of their content will slow to a snail’s pace. This is the latest attempt to choke out competition, and it will NOT work. It will not work because many people are coming together to build their own high speed network infrastructure. It will not work because mass media storage is cheap and widely available. Even if the Internet today is completely choked out, alternative netwoks will fill the void and provide people what they want.
If Wiley thinks that they can continue to get away with charging $35 for something that costs next to nothing to reproduce and distribute, they have another think coming. A home burnable DVD can store hundreds of ebooks. These same ebooks can be found at various websites, newsgroups, and peer to peer networks. If 10 students in a single college class gets together, they can buy a college textbook, take it apart, scan the pages, and make the entire book available online. In other words, these students have made information available to everyone and paid only 10 cents on the dollar to obtain the information. The next step in this evolution of the college textbook will be the day college professors and graduate students decide to write their own textbooks and distribute them online. When this happens, it will be a bad day for the publishers.
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:22 am
You are and wrong about the reprints.
My husband teaches in several universities. He always gets free instructor textbooks to review and recommend or pass on. He usually passes. Nothing much changes other than the reprint date, the page numbers and the type used in the printing. His passing and using older texts enables the students to buy used textbooks. There is no outdated information and every one is happy.
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:25 am
Cotton pickin’ cats that think they can type! I meant to say, “You are right and you are wrong…”