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Pirating abandoned content?

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Carol Haynes:
But what if the consumers are poor too - poor starving developers with poor starving uneducated sick malformed children & a granny in hospital vs poor starving uneducated tots with poor starving malnourished relatives, three of them in rehab. What is the right thing to do then? Will the penniless shantydwellers downgrade to a Hayes Accura 228 for a month and do the right thing or will everybody just... starve? Who will live and who will die? And will that ebook get read already!!?
-nosh (May 16, 2008, 09:10 AM)
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Maybe they should all sell their laptops and plasma TVs and go and buy a burger!  :-[

app103:
A lot of poor starving developers educated themselves with free legal ebooks, coding and compiling with dev-c++ (or Delphi 6 Personal  ;)), on an old hunk of junk computer.

If you are going the self education route, there are plenty of free resources on the internet that are perfectly legal. Finding them is the issue, sometimes. It's why I spend time searching and digging for stuff, so those that need it can find it much easier. There is a lot of good stuff out there that needs someone to hang a big neon sign over it.

This would be a perfect example of something expensive in print that is free & legal in electronic form:

Handbook of Virtual Humans: VRlab in Switzerland was a major contributor to the work and you can read the book, free & legal, on their site, and it is enhanced with videos.  Or you can buy the print version at amazon.com for $190.00 new or $89.99 used, and you don't get any videos.

That is quite a lot of money that could be saved by a starving student that might be required to read it for a course or someone that is trying to self educate themselves in order to have a chance of making a better life for their family. But they wouldn't know they could save that money and have better than print (or better than a pirated version of the print edition), if they can't find it or don't know it exists.

Personally, I think if you are a student and not going the self education route, that your books should be included in that high tuition you are paying and should be distributed to all students taking the course, in class, rather than them making you go on a wild hunt for the books at a price you can afford and getting them by a certain date.

Remember how they did things when you were a kid? They passed out textbooks in the beginning of the year and collected them at the end of the year. You didn't have to pay for the book unless you damaged it.

Schools can get the books cheaper than you. They get them at wholesale cost, not retail. And they could probably get a volume discount by buying so many. Even if they added it to the cost of your tuition, the amount would still be much smaller, if they give you the books at cost instead of trying to make a profit on them.

A few months ago I heard about a university professor, at GMU in Washington DC, that required students to purchase a textbook from him, that he wrote. He charged students a very high price for it, wouldn't allow them to buy it used, and the book included a label with the student's name and a serial number (how is that for anti-piracy!). If you didn't purchase the book, you could not pass the course. It was required! You couldn't even sell this book when you were done with it, because every student that took his course was in the same position that you were and couldn't buy it used.

It is quite possible that this teacher was making more off his book, by taking advantage of his students, than he was from teaching the course. People like that should die in an avalanche of used textbooks.

Carol Haynes:
A few months ago I heard about a university professor, at GMU in Washington DC, that required students to purchase a textbook from him, that he wrote. He charged students a very high price for it, wouldn't allow them to buy it used, and the book included a label with the student's name and a serial number (how is that for anti-piracy!). If you didn't purchase the book, you could not pass the course. It was required! You couldn't even sell this book when you were done with it, because every student that took his course was in the same position that you were and couldn't buy it used.

It is quite possible that this teacher was making more off his book, by taking advantage of his students, than he was from teaching the course. People like that should die in an avalanche of used textbooks.
-app103 (May 16, 2008, 11:19 AM)
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In the UK that wouldn't be allowed - it is tantamount to extortion and at least a huge conflict of interest. The best thing the students could do is boycott his course en masse until he gets sacked.

cathodera:
what if you were a poor author, with poor student children to feed, clothe and educate, who needs the money because his book on maths is highly dis-regarded?
-tsaint (May 16, 2008, 06:26 AM)
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One of the things I would like to see is a transition to authors becoming their own publishers, which is much easier to do with e-books.

The way it is now, the publisher a lot of say about how much money the author gets from sales of his books, and I think that putting that say back into the author's hands would be a good thing.

I don't pretend to know how any of this will shake out - applying traditional anything, from business models to laws and back again to the reality of it all being free for the taking  is kind of like if someone brought you a pair of shoes that you wore as a baby and told you to put them on!

One of the things that makes it so fascinating to read the different points of view is that invariably so much of it keeps coming back to culture.

In some cultures, people are glad to sacrifice even the health and futures of their own children if they can help large companies become stronger. In other cultures, medical treatment would not be seen as a commercial product at all, but a basic human right, and it would be unthinkable to have people losing their savings, even their homes, because they or a family member had a serious injury or illness.

Both sides have very strong beliefs, and both sides might say that the other side is "wrong." Such is the nature of culture and belief!

With issues like intellectual property, it is no different. Some cultures include very strong beliefs about it, for other cultures, it is more of a huh? File not found - which would translate, in terms of behavior, to strong beliefs in a different direction.

So, will it boil down to a question of numbers? To what percentage of the planet are culturally inclined toward a strong belief in intellectual property as a concept?

In other situations, we would have to say, well, that would depend on what those cultures have. If they have more money, and again depending on culture, weapons, then even people whose beliefs  might be different could be obliged to submit to the cavedude with the bigger rock, as it were.

But what makes this all so fascinating is that here, we are talking about actual individuals having more autonomy in their behavior, and that behavior not really being as controllable by a government, or even large companies, as is the case in other areas.

In the other rant, one example I used had to do with countries whose governments might want the  citizens to visit only websites that reside on servers in that country, or just want them to avoid visiting other websites, and go to great lengths and employ some very talented people to effect that programatically.

But there are other people who are not affiliated with any government, who are also very talented, who will come up with a workaround for the citizens of that country who would like to visit any website they wish to!

Or take the example of a very large company that wishes to track your surfing behavior, and they have so much money that they are able to get other companies, whose websites are very popular, to install their software to that end.

And how many of us have such companies in our hosts file? Even that big, huge company, who might even send representatives into legislatures to write laws that all must obey could be receiving either nothing, or junk data from the computer of a poor person, and there is nothing they can do about it!

There is so much knowledge in the heads and hands of so many ordinary people now, all over the world, that I am not even sure that the companies could shut down the internet, if they ever did feel that it would be more profitable for them to do so!

Just ponder that!

iphigenie:
One thing rarely known is that most authors wait years - 5 or often more - before they get their book royalties. This is because, supposedly, of book store returns.

I suspect small press publishers work differently, but the big ones seem to use every excuse to delay paying their authors.

Incredible how so many systems are at the detriment of the original creator of the work :S

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