Ridiculous theater. It's an ebook. Trading it makes zero sense. It cost nothing to duplicate. NFTs are for zero sum status games. Nothing about this makes sense
If the online exercises are tied to the ebook, then they can justify “trading” old versions of textbooks by revoking access for the former owner. This is a super shady practice and I hope this doesn’t become a reality.
Students should really band together and start pressuring their universities to ban professors from participating in these practices.
The department is basically making students pay extra money so that they can save the cost of a TA to manually grade homework. That's not going to stop unless the students call foul and push back.
So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
It's intellectual property, and duplicating it is piracy. Do I judge pirates? No, they're taking risks, and that's their own prerogative.
I am all for available and affordable resources, but expecting a book someone else wrote for free is a bit ridiculous.
>So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas.
That being said, I'm pragmatic and realize that copyright (and patents/trademarks/etc.) can be a necessary evil as well, which is why I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so. No reason Disney should have exclusive rights to their latest Marvel CGI-fest for longer than someone who discovers a cure for cancer would have exclusive rights to profit from their discovery.
> I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so.
I agree. It should be no longer than a patent duration. Death of the author + 70 years is just an insane duration and means that works created in your lifetime will practically never enter public domain before you die.
I could go for some scheme where the first 10 years are free, and then you have to register for $x where x is a value that doubles every year. That allows the big IPs to get roughly what they want for commercially viable stuff, but also means that 99% of stuff will drop out of copyright quickly.
The original term in the US was 14 years with one optional 14-year renewal. That sounds good to me.
The most popular thing I've written was 27 years ago, so the initial versions would just about be in the public domain now. But the newer versions would still be copyrighted.
I tend to think more along the lines of sequel rights. The copyrighted idea is not the exact same words, but the idea of the universe of Star Wars. I think we would live in a world of superior creativity if making money off derivative works made without permission was legal. (Probably those works should be required to say “unofficial” on them or something along those lines)
I have a... partial counter-argument to this. Publishers would absolutely jump at the chance to screw over individual authors with "unofficial" derivative works.
In fact, we know this to be the case because its how publishing used to work pre-Berne Convention. Imagine the mid-90s anime fansubbing scene, except everyone is a for-profit business who is able to obtain copyright over their translations of other people's work. It was incredibly scummy and hostile to artists in ways that would make Jeff Bezos[0] blush.
There's also a related problem of dividing "official" and "unofficial" works in such a way as to be legally airtight. "Noncommercial use" is actually really narrow, because the work itself is a commercial product and its production costs money. Think about how many fan artists have Patreon campaigns these days: sure, you don't have to pay to view their work, but they are still running the same kind of business that the original/official release is using. It's the sort of thing more appropriate for the original creators to just have a blanket "I don't care about people who do X, Y, or Z" policy/license rather than peeling back the legal protections on certain creative jobs in a way that, say, the scumbags at large media conglomerates might figure out how to monetize. Or, in other words, that fanartist with a Patreon is arguably protected from corporate competition by the fact that their work is illegal but practically unprosecuted in a way you can't put into law.
None of this would matter, of course, if copyright terms were limited to a short time period. All of the more onerous copyright rules I mentioned above were far more tolerable in a world where copyright on works people cared about regularly expired. If lawmakers had known that copyright terms would get blown out to life plus a tail period that is basically another life term, they probably would not have allowed derivative works to be controlled in this fashion.
[0] Owner of Amazon, the company that put your local bookstore out of business and then made it incredibly easy to resell other people's books on their platform
> Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas.
These are extreme views. That's fine! But it's why we get crap like Pearson putting NFTs on textbooks. Because reasonable objections get drowned out by fringe opposition.
I'd like it that if a work has been out of print for more than 10 years then its copyright should expire, regardless of the remaining copyright duration. Let them have their 100+ year copyright, but its forfeit if they don't bother to keep it in print. Let somebody else print it if you can't be bothered.
Not the GP, but the argument could be summarized as:
Intellectual work takes time and effort only once when it is created. Copying information is so cheap, it is close to zero. Yet, copyright holders accumulate copyrightable material and try to earn money from it in perpetuity. This is the classic case of rent seeking where the concept of ownership is used to take value from the labor of others.
I don't fully agree with this interpretation, but I won't say that I totally disagree either.
I think your parent was expressing the inherent tradeoff in Copyright.
On the one hand, the country has a vested interested in allowing citizens to participate in culture. That doesn't just mean consuming, but also modifying and creating using inspiration from other parts of culture.
On the other hand, the country recognizes that the generation of cultural artifacts is greatly increased if creators have limited monopoly rights over their creations so they can more easily make a living creating them.
I'm not sure if I would call it a "moral evil", but I can understand how one could.
Copyright is the only way that digital workers can be paid. To put a lefty spin on it, copyright is just a form of union that allows digital workers to keep control of their work. Regular property laws protect artisans and craftspeople who work with physical things from having their work stolen so they can earn a living.
Don't you feel that the writers, coders, and digital artists deserve to have some control over their work too?
Once you share an idea you should have a chance to be compensated for your work, but it enters the collective unconscious and it becomes part of society.
It's like having a child, you can raise it however you like until a certain point, but then it goes out into the world.
Sure it is for life-- and longer. If a carpenter builds a house, that house is the carpenter's forever. He/she can pass it on to their heirs and those can pass it onto their heirs. The same goes for all physical goods.
And, others have pointed this out, but copyright has nothing to do with ideas. If you want to write your own book with the ideas, go to it.
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
I do not believe that publishers deserve to get paid for anything after the sale. We already have an existing mechanism to prevent the second half of that question from happening: it's called copyright. It is illegal for me to make a copy and distribute that copy, at least for any book published in the last 95 years (and honestly, that period is itself way too long).
That there is a vibrant secondhand market for textbooks in particular is a testament to the failures of publishers to make their retention desirable. I hold no sympathy for them, and I bristle at the notion that they deserve to be recompensed for their mistakes.
The side-effect of this kind of attitude is that the purchaser must capitalize the whole price of a book or work. Right now, if a student buys a textbook, the student pays full price and then recoups some later by reselling it.
The goal of this current scheme is to lower the initial cost by spreading out the fees among everyone who uses a copy. In an ideal version of this model, a textbook that normally costs $100 could be sold for $10 and then used for ten years. The publisher still gets $100 but the students only need to pay $10 each.
For example, digital games also do not have the ability to resell them, but they aren't inherently cheaper to compensate for this. This is because creative works are not priced cost-plus, they are priced by perceived value.
Insamuch as digital textbooks will be cheaper than physical, it will be purely a psychological pricing thing rather than a function of the publisher's expected profit. If that $100 textbook was $90 used, the digital copy will be $85, even though the publisher would still get the same total revenue selling them for $10. They will bank on students not accounting for the used market at the end of the semester lowering their total costs (or students not having extra cashflow to lock up in textbooks).
On the contrary, there's no reason to believe the exorbitant initial cost would change at all. If anything, this would make it worse.
The reason textbooks can cost as much as they do is that demand is very inelastic - students don't have any real alternatives to purchasing textbooks (in most cases.) As a result, there's little downward pressure on textbook prices.
Without any reason to lower prices, publishers would absolutely take this opportunity to maximize profits by raising secondhand prices and taking most or all of the difference. Students will be forced to buy them anyway, so why wouldn't they?
There are plenty of reasons to believe it. Publishers are already "renting" printed textbooks to students for a term for a dramatically lower price. I'm sure they would love to do the same with digital copies.
> The goal of this current scheme is to lower the initial cost by spreading out the fees among everyone who uses a copy. In an ideal version of this model, a textbook that normally costs $100 could be sold for $10 and then used for ten years. The publisher still gets $100 but the students only need to pay $10 each.
What would almost certainly happen is the publisher still sells it for $100 initially, and then gets $10 for each of the resales. I mean, look at the effect that ebooks (which skip the costs of printing the textbooks!) had on textbook prices, or, rather, the lack of effect.
But this is already not happening. Textbook publishers are already giving students a choice to either buy a textbook outright or "rent" it for dramatically lower. This is already happening with physical books. I'm sure the publishers (at least some of them) would love to come up with some similar scheme with digital books.
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
This isn't piracy that we are talking about. This is the publisher wanting to be in on every sale after the initial one. It's a bit like if you wanted to sell your John Deere lawnmower at a yard sale, but John Deere sent out a representative to make sure the company collected 20% of whatever you sold that lawnmower for.
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
What exactly is your problem with this model?
Seriously - lets have this conversation for real. What is ethically wrong with a model that states "I will create this thing for you if you pay me X up front - then it is a public good"?
Many indie creators are already using this model. It seems like an absolutely fair trade.
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Further, continuing the conversation how in the fucking fuckitty fuck do you think that model is less ethical than the complete repeal of the right of first sale that these publishers seem to be working towards?
How can you possibly attempt to justify their actions as ANYTHING other than literal rent seeking, at great societal expense?
at the root of this is the question of ownership. Digital goods have a questionable concept of ownership vs access through rental fees. If i buy a book, it is mine and i can do with it what i please.
That concept is much easier to implement with a physical object as opposed to a digital one.
No disagreement from me - I think digital goods lay bare the dirty secret that "ownership" is a social norm, not any sort of real truth.
I also think that digital goods remove any sort of "harm" that can be reasonably expressed from having your sole ownership removed.
If you own a digital book, and I copy it - you are not deprived of your digital book. We both now own it.
It seems to me that a robust model based around funding the creation of new work, rather than the sale of work, is a much more efficient and ethical solution than any sort of government enforced IP.
Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure Capitalism. And so as free would mean no incentives to actually create anything, we give an even worse of a hack to deal with it, ownership.
You don't want to fund the creation, funding the creation is inherently risky. Let the creators bear that risk, they know more than any central governing entity. A better way to deal with this is to discover what the intrinsic value for the product is, allow the creator to give it away, and then subsidize the creator the value they generated as it accrues month-by-month.
The nice thing with this system is that we can transition to it really easily. There are already many Open Source projects that exist, all we need to do is ear-mark a certain sized pot, figure out the weights of existing products, and hand it out. And as the economy gets stronger, allow the pot to grow, and eventually there might not be a thing as closed software, as open software will always be able to generate more value than closed.
I believe it is possible to do so through a modified Vickrey auction wherein real money is used. A Vickrey auction is one in which the winners pays the price the second place bidder placed - or as I prefer to look at it, the first loser. Vickrey auctions are great because they get the bidder to bid their true value. This gives us good data to determine what a certain product is worth. In this modified Vickrey auction the top 50%(or some other optimizing number we can work out) of bidders win, and they all pay the price of the highest non-winner.
So that would mean that 50% of people get access, and we're turning away 50%. But we can do better than that, as we know from sampling, we don't need to know everyone's values to get a good idea of what something is worth, so we can use sortition to decide if a given user is even going to bid in the first place. So this might mean for a given product you only sample 0.01%, and then only 0.005% go without. That seems rather fair to me. Once we have a value for a product, the next year we might not even have an auction for it, and everyone would get access to it.
And we can do better than that, since the money is being subsidized, and presumably this would result in a more efficient society, the money collected through these auctions need not fund the subsidy. What we can instead do is have the auction results just be given to everyone who opts into the sortition process similar to the carbon price and dividend system. Anyone who uses less than the median amount would see that their time spent valuing products as a net-postive, and anyone who doesn't want to vote doesn't get their cut.
We would then use these weights to give away all grant money. This might mean that Firefox can be funded exclusively through this pot, and they would no longer be beholden to Google for default Search. It would mean the grant writing process would go away. Eventually the pot would grow so large that even private products, wanting a cut of their own, go open source. It would mean, as ads make products less valuable, that ads go away.
The concept only makes sense for physical objects.
The problem are the definitions of "piracy", "robbery", "theft", etc.
There's two ways you could reasonably define them: by the loss, or by the gain.
From a simple ethical/logical viewpoint it stands to reason that if a gain can occur without a loss, that's good for everyone - so we should define theft to have occurred only when a loss is incurred (and hence intellectual property theft wouldn't be theft, and the very concept of IP makes no sense).
Unfortunately just because it's good for everyone doesn't mean it'll obviously work out that way. Defining theft by the unauthorised gain of something (regardless of whether there was a loss) lets those with the authority to grant rights to those gains profit. That profit can then be used to create incentives for others with authority (through lobbying, for instance), creating a situation where despite the fact that it's in the common interest to define theft solely on the basis of loss, it's in the interest of those with authority to define it as any gain which is not approved by an anointed member of the authority structure (either economically or politically).
Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.
> Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.
Further, and this is the one that really kills me: Countries/Companies that ignore IP have a serious competitive advantage.
It's not only more ethical, it's also more efficient. It's folly to believe that IP laws will protect you against these motivated actors, and playing the game internally is slowing us down and hampering our own performance.
There's nothing wrong with payment for creating public domain work. As you said, this can be done today.
However, it's fairly limiting if that's the only way copywrite material can be compensated.
For example, I enjoy paying to see a movie that I want to see once it's out and has been reviewed. What I don't want, is to crowd-fund the movies I think I want to watch in 3-5 years from now.
If, once created, copyright becomes public domain how do you see big IP's being funded realistically?
Making additional copies / replicas to pass around? No that shouldn't be free. Taking something I've paid for and giving or selling my copy to someone else? Yes should be free
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
This was how copyright worked in Europe until quite recently. A composer was only entitled to the royalties of the first public performance of their work, and after that it was public domain.
You wonder why the likes of Bach, Vivaldi, etc. were such prolific composers: The system was designed that way.
No, they just think publishers only deserve to get paid for copies, not licenses.
In the Old Days we had a legal doctrine of copyright exhaustion, whereby once a copyright holder had made a copy and sold it, they had to point to some further act of copying in order to claim infringement. This meant that copyright owners got paid and the public, generally, didn't have to worry about copyright any further.
Then the computers and Internet came. Devices whose only interaction with information is to copy it. Publishers realized that they could defraud the public of their First Sale rights in two steps:
1. Get the courts to believe that every interaction between a computer and a copyrighted work is infringement[0]
2. Stick "licensed-and-not-sold" language on everything they possibly could
There is a direct through-line between the time when copyright was an obscure regulation on publishing houses to today's "you will own nothing and be happy" rhetoric. NFTs are just another manifestation of that: they purport to emulate physical property by letting us sell and resell dangling pointers to a work, as some kind of exercise in mixing the harms of DRM[1] and financialization into one particularly toxic soup. That's why the games industry jumped on them so damned quickly, and why the textbook publishers want in on that next.
[0] See MAI Systems Corp v. Peak Computer, a 9th Circuit ruling so nutty that it argues that dynamic RAM is a fixed medium and any software that isn't execute-in-place cannot be run without a licensing agreement
[1] Yes I know NFTs do not have DRM in and of themselves, "right click, save as" is a meme. Getting DRM into the system is phase two.
As a freshman, I had to buy a calculus textbook. Now, this was introductory calculus, pretty much the stuff Newton/Leibniz invented and nothing else. It's been the same for centuries.
But the textbook was on version 9. Nine! Why? Because every year, a new version was sold, with the only difference being the problems are numbered differently - so when the professor handed out homework, you needed the new version to keep up.
I'm an uber-capitalist, but making money should come from adding value, not whatever these idiots are doing.
Yeah, predatory practices like these remove all sense of remorse I have when borrowing a PDF from someone else's hard drive. No one should respect companies and institutions that are just out to shaft everyone.
To be fair, textbooks have improved tremendously in pedagogy over the decades. I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today.
I can almost tolerate the exorbitant costs of textbooks on the basis of the existence of a vibrant used textbook market. But what keeps me from doing so is the lengths to which the publishers go to stamp out that used market, without any concomitant reductions in price. You want to play the rapidly-coming-out-with-new-editions game, the one-time-use online code game? Fine, I ain't forking out more for your textbook than any other book (that would be $20), and if you're not offering it at that price point, well, the $0 you're getting instead should be sufficient comfort.
My counter argument is that the pedagogy is primarily with the teachers/professors and the lessons themselves. Granted, the textbooks do contain information about how to go about solving the problems. But in my experience the textbooks primarily functioned as a repository of to-do math problems. Given that math problems cannot be copyrighted, I really feel like most of these textbooks have content for the sake of making the book intellectual property and such fluff is ignored by most classes.
> I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today.
Of course there are some excellent recent calculus books, but that doesn't mean all books over 50 aren't good. There are some great old calculus books.
Money is supposed to represent production (agricultural, industrial and services) and it's usage is a way we invented to share a country production between the participants.
The fact that you can claim a part of the production without producing yourself is silly (and necessary since we age), but that's how the system work.
Now, the morality of how you do it, wether you are doing that by owning land, owning stuff already made, scamming old people, receiving government pensions or using predatory endeavors to capture money from a captive public, doesn't come from the system. This morality we decide collectively by voting laws an politicians who have a view on the question. There, you can have socialist, liberal or conservative morality (and a few other) to choose what is acceptable or not. For example, conservative are deontologists (in my country) while you have a mix of deontologism and nihilism amongst people on the far right (and far, far left).
All that to say you probably aren't an Uber -capitalist (i had a whole paragraph to explain what it meant to me and that this doesn't exist anymore in developed countries, but i had to go deep and it wasn't that interesting)
Why should a rightsholder should retain control of a work throughout its existence? That's what this discussion is really about - Pearson abusing the blockchain to insert themselves into private transactions between third parties. One of the biggest failings of the digital age was not baking "first sale" rights into the system from the beginning. Just like with everything else, adding "on/with/by a computer" to anything seems to be free rent-seeking territory.
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?
You mean like all other objects ever made? Cars e.g. are routinely resold and automakers never receive a dime after the first purchase from a dealer. This is the norm.
