Teacher’s Patent Chokes Textbook Sharing (On and Offline)

June 12, 2012 by
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services, Legal P2P News & Issues 

The academic space when met with the issue of file-sharing has raised a lot of questions regarding both moral aspects and particular circumstances sprung in a special context

Students share textbooks, and all sort of related materials through Facebook’s new Group feature, for example, but now things are really getting complicated.

Why? Because a new patent has been granted to Joseph Hengry Vogel – an economics professor – who’s decided to stop this behavior among students to share or lend textbooks online or offline.

Fact is that when we talk about getting your hands on a college degree, we talk about business. The main idea to stop the impulse of sharing course-books is to discourage students by lowering their grades, which seems quite fair, does it?
“Professors are increasingly turning a blind eye when students appear in class with photocopied pages. Others facilitate piracy by placing texts in the library reserve where they can be photocopied,” said professor Vogel.

He also believes that borrowing and/or reselling are an act of piracy, thus threatening the publishing industry. In other words, if you’re a student and want to acquire a book from your local library isn’t moral at all?

On the other hand, if you purchase a second-hand book seems to be ok as long as you buy the access code for a “discount” rate. Double the fun, so double the money for publishers for a single book, right?

One of the supporters of the idea is Anthem Press of London who showed quite the interest with this system.

If the system is really going to be embraced, the lending system for books may fall like a house of clay.

Question is, and I’m pretty sure that every student in this world had experienced this at least once, who’s checking on publishers, and I especially refer to college and University professors who charge their students with not so friendly prices of their own books “or else” the grade at the final exam will substantially drop? Oh, but that kind of information rarely reaches the media, so if people don’t write about it so often, it doesn’t exist.

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