Patent Granted on Mandatory Digital Keys to Prevent Textbook Piracy 168
First time accepted submitter discussM tipped us to a story about a recently granted patent in which "a system and method preventing unauthorized access to copyrighted academic texts is provided in which trademark licenses, discussion boards, and grade content are integrated into a web-based system that aligns the interests of teaching professionals, students, and publishers while also enhancing the overarching academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge." Quoting Torrent Freak: "As part of a course, students will have to participate in a web-based discussion board, an activity which counts towards their final grade. To gain access to the board students need a special code, which they get by buying the associated textbook." But don't worry too much, from Ars: "Beyond the legal questions, other experts suggested forcing students to buy texts through such a system is unlikely to be implemented. Professors have few incentives to make it more difficult and to compel students even more than they already are to buy textbooks, digital or analog. (A 2011 survey from UC Riverside found that 78 percent of undergraduates 'bought fewer books, bought cheaper books or read books on reserve to help meet expenses.')"
Profs and books (Score:5, Insightful)
They ought to ask how many professors bought all the textbooks they required as students, and never used photocopies.
Then why file for a patent? (Score:2)
As if we believe in the fairy tale that someone has gone all the troubles (and the associated costs) to file a patent RESTRICTING access to specific academic texts to only those who are authorized that THEY WON'T CHARGE ANYTHING ??
They think we live in fairy land
Re:Then why file for a patent? (Score:5, Insightful)
They think we live in fairy land
I think they live in a fairy land. From the summary.
...enhancing the overarching academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge.
The idea that protecting copyright helps encourage the creation process is at least a valid idea. However I don't see any way that restricting the ability to copy that knowledge somehow helps disseminate it.
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Yeah. Enforcing copyright laws is defined by restricting the dissemination of knowledge.
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The idea that protecting copyright helps encourage the creation process is at least a valid idea.
Maybe technically valid, but still completely wrong. For example if Terry Pratchett was not allowed to use public domain works as a basis for his own Discworld series, the Discworld books would either suck or not exist at all.
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Could you give more details on this? I haven't read his books, but based on what I've heard of the books, they parody (or take inspiration from) certain aspects of other author's books - including J.R.R. Tolkien. Wikipedia says that the Discworld books were published from 1983 until the present. J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" books were written between 1937 and 1949 and published in 1937, 1954, 1955. Presumably, they were (and still are) under copyright - which means they were not public domain when Terry Pratchett parodied them.
I've read the entire main series of Discworld books except Snuff and Raising Taxes and Pratchett really does parody a lot of older works, Shakespeare in particular, though I haven't found anything that would remind me of Tolkien. There are two Shakespeare parody books: Wyrd Sisters (combination of Macbeth and Hamlet, the first spoken line in Pratchett's book is verbatim first spoken line from Macbeth) and Lords and Ladies (I believe it's a parody of A Midsummer Night's Dream but I'm not completely sure). Sh
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Colleges should make this type of practice public beforehand. It'd certainly a part in my decision to attend or not.
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I've heard this as well from someone who has written a textbook. Many places don't allow them to collect royalties for copies sold on their own campus, not just for their own classes. And the pay that they get is close to nothing. My friend got a very small advance relative to the amount of work it was, and then had to pay her own copy editor because the publishing house offshored the editing and they introduced huge numbers of errors.
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When I was in school, only one of my textbooks was written by the instructor. However, it was an excellent book and I still have it.
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In 4 years of undergrad and 6 years of grad school at major universities, I never once had a class where the professor wrote the textbook. I did use a textbook as an undergrad that was written by one of the faculty where I went to grad school. He did use it for his class when he taught it, but not all of the faculty who taught the same class did. It was quite a good book and not particularly expensive, and wasn't regularly revised just to have new problems sets-- it was a senior level quantum mechanics te
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Personally I don't believe DRM is going to work. The music industry couldn't get it to work and
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I had a class in college where the textbook was written by the professor teaching the course. The textbook was so poorly written that he pretty had to abandon it even for his own class.
Free Curriculum Foundation? (Score:3)
How come good free curriculum hasn't emerged? There are a few free curriculum projects out there, but they tend to have low quality, incompatible formats, and make it difficult for people to contribute.
Re:Free Curriculum Foundation? (Score:5, Interesting)
How come good free curriculum hasn't emerged? There are a few free curriculum projects out there, but they tend to have low quality, incompatible formats, and make it difficult for people to contribute.
Because there's not incentive for professors and other professionals to participate in the development of such. If you wanted it to happen, you'd make the professors' pay or tenure contingent on their contributing to the development of public-domain curriculum in their discipline.
Re:Free Curriculum Foundation? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are plenty of free or open source textbooks listed if you search, and whether it's appropriate for your class depends on your requirements. Other than that, I can't say anything about the quality of all of them, only the half dozen I've reviewed which looked just fine, but the teachers hadn't gone through them yet.
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Re:Free Curriculum Foundation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Free Curriculum Foundation? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of good, free and low-cost textbooks, and many professors use them.
But, given that students are willing to pay tens of thousands per year to go to college in the first place, a few hundreds dollars in books hardly make a big difference.
Book purchases made up 30% of my fees (Score:3)
Re:Free Curriculum Foundation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just about every single skill can be learned for free online. Want to know about British history? Identify Roman coins? Learn C#? You can find that for free online. Unless you have a degree though, chances are you aren't going to make it past the first round of screening HR does.
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You don't go to a four-year college to learn a skill... if that's what you're after, you're missing the point.
Everything I've seen in open course ware teaches introductory material at most. Yes, you can learn C# on-line. But knowing a language and knowing how to work in a team or make high quality software come only through doing it. You can go through a trial by fire by working with an open source project, or go to a university and have a professor facilitate a project, evaluating you along the way and cor
Re:Free Curriculum Foundation? (Score:4, Informative)
You are right, but then it would make sense that Universities, instead of costing the price of a family house, would transform to a professional social network, where individuals with different skills could organize different study groups, and academic reference would be the list of workgroups with their freely available, freely usable published results, depending on the field.
It is insane to see that while the cost of distributing information is rapidly falling, the costs of education is steadily growing.
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Just about every single skill can be learned for free online.
Nothing has changed except now you don't have to drive. Before the internet you only had to go to the public library. That's where I learned electronics in the '60s (that and hacking around) and computers in the '80s. Any good encyclopedia would give you a start on a subject, with cited sources you could use to examine the subject in greater detail. I probably read 500 books on computing (including the TTL Cookbook) before I had a real handle on t
Wow, nice. (Score:2, Interesting)
More DRM nonsense. Stop being so paranoid about piracy that you hurt your own customers.
Forced pay even if you don't want the book (Score:3)
In the original sense of the word, forcing someone to give you their money is textbook piracy.
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Then I sure hope people have a "right" to remove any nonsensical DRM and use their own property in any way they wish. After someone has bought it from you, you're powerless (or should be, but remember, so-called "rights" can be given or taken away).
Re:Wow, nice. (Score:5, Interesting)
Authors have a *right* to direct how their work is used.
Not content with the right to control sales, now they want you to prove you bought it
in order to take the class.
What happens when roommates decide to share the book? Will they let two students register
with the same book id number for the useless on-line material (which only exists to get your book ID number)?
I shared several books with a roomie in college, because we took the courses at different time of the day.
The hall book-handoff was a daily ritual. We split the price of the book, and resold it splitting the proceeds.
If this scheme locks out Book IDs that were used previously, what happens to the first sale doctrine?
Re:Wow, nice. (Score:4, Informative)
At least according to the 9th Circuit in Vernor v. Autodesk, there is no first sale doctrine if the transaction includes a licensing agreement which substantially restricts (such as prohibiting subsequent transfer of the access license) the rights of the purchaser. All this, even if the transaction is treated as a straight-up sale in all other regards by both parties (full upfront payment with no obligation to return the material after a time, and no further obligations on the part of the seller).
As a result, any sale can be converted to a license simply by posting a licensing agreement which includes restrictive terms. This latter part is not idle speculation, but is actually specifically noted by the 9th Circuit order. Given that the 9th Circuit declined an en banc hearing on the results and SCOTUS declined certiorari, the ruling will stand unchallenged until the unlikely event that another Circuit issues an opposing ruling. Given that the US judiciary has evolved from ruling on function (looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck) over form (looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, appellant claims it's a cat, probably a cat), it's unlikely SCOTUS would reverse this ruling even if it somehow ends up in front of them though.
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Book sales are not the same as software.
Re:Wow, nice. (Score:5, Informative)
I agree. The 9th Circuit judges who heard the case I listed do not.
Specifically:
The Court tacitly agrees with the ALA's claims as to the potential effects of the ruling on other media should the licensing practices of the software industry be adopted by other distributors outside the software industry. Book sales are only different because the use of licensing has not been adopted. Without Congressional intervention, book and video sellers are free to adopt the conventions of software licensing and end secondary markets.
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Since when? They have a granted right to be the sole source of copies for a limited time, but that is a bargain with the public, not a natural right. They do NOT have a right to decide how the work is used.If I want to buy a copy of your finely crafted magnum opus and run it through the Swedish Chef filter, that's *MY* right. If you don't like it, don't sell copies of your book, ever.
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Since when?
Since Sept 10th, 2010.
Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., 621 F. 3d 1102 - 2010
Students are PAYING CUSTOMERS and should demand... (Score:5, Insightful)
...Free and Open textbooks for all their courses.
School is PURELY a financial transaction, but schools want to fuck their customers good and hard. (I found working in a community college highly educational.) They want to make programs fit available funding, and Pell Grant farming is standard.
The profits made on books are calculated as part of the profit of each program. They are NOT provided by the school book store as a convenience, unless you consider anal rape convenient.
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...Free and Open textbooks for all their courses.
This is exactly what OpenStax College Physics [openstaxcollege.org] is providing: a popular but out of print textbook that was picked up by a couple of charitable organization (incl. Bill & Melinda Gates, I admit) and republished under a Creative Commons license. I will teach 170 pre-med students from this 'textbook' in the fall.
I do disagree vehemently with the rest of your comment!
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What do you mean by Pell Grant farming?
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According to the NCES [ed.gov], inflation has been most marked and correlated to Pell Grant availability within the for profit, private schools. Public colleges and private, not for profit schools show lower increases and less correlation.
The canard that school loans cause tuition increases is another right-wing canard, true mainly because the for-profits are skewing the numbers. As usual, it is another right-wing smoke-and-mirrors assertion, where the right's solution (the free enterprise, for-profit colleges) actu
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Course fees? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever happened to just charging a fee for attending the course?
Stop trying to make extra money through textbook "upsells". Be upfront and honest by charging the book fee as part of the upfront course fees and give each student a copy.
Re:Course fees? (Score:4, Informative)
Unless customers DEMAND change it won't happen because book sales are highly profitable.
College is a business. Business is war.
Re:Course fees? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yea, if I'm selling a widget for $5, and someone comes along and gives everyone $10 to buy my widget, then I am going to up my price to $10.
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I try to buy online, but keep getting screwed by these specific versions. I often dont even know about the version until teh first day of class when the syllabus is handed out. So, if I take the initiative to find the book before class starts, I get the added bonus of buying it again for a code. In saving money this way, I end up not having the book for several classes, and getting to buy the thing twice. I dont know why the summary says that this is not likely to happen, as it has happened to me three time
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You are (most of the time) talking about different entities extracting the fees. Tuition money goes to the college. The money you pay for a textbook goes to the textbook publisher.
Back when price of textbooks were reasonable, professors would select textbooks according to their contents. Since in some areas there are many textbooks with comparable contents, publishers started competing in providing "perks" to teachers with their textbook: a test generator, an online gradebook, an online homework system e
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The money you pay for a textbook goes to the textbook publisher.
Only partially true. Most colleges drastically mark up the price of textbooks, and the above ignores the vast quantity of used textbooks they purchase for 10% of cost and resell for 90% of new.
It also ignores the practice of professors creating custom, very non-professional texts for their classes and splitting the profits with the college. These are texts which cannot be obtained anywhere else, and are frequently packaged in such a way that th
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Also, of the dozen or so colleges I'm at least passingly familiar with, all require professors to list at least one text even if the class is structured so one is not necessary. The better professors of those particular classes would inform the students on the first day that purchasing the text was optional even if the course guide claimed it was mandatory. This didn't help those who had purchased a new text and taken the shrinkwrap off before the first day of class though. Instant 25-30% deduction from the
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there are some colleges that loan out textbooks like a grade school or high school does, or that charge modest rental fees (a fraction of what even a used copy would sell for) so you don't have to buy them if you don't want (or can't afford) to.
the reason that colleges don't just give them out as part of tuition is that tuition can be paid by scholarships, grants and other aid. it wouldn't really be right if students could sell those 'free' books, converting some of their financial aid to cash, to buy more
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Oh, and world peace too. (Score:2, Interesting)
Not surprisingly, Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party, says he's also against such a system.
"The notion that academics go to lengths to prevent the spread of knowledge comes close to sacrilegious," he wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "In particular, it is a complete conflict of interest between the profits of old-guard publishers and the real mission of academia—to spread knowledge as widely as possible."
The high cost of education in general prevents the "wide spread of knowledge" as well.
They ought to ask about prior art (Score:2)
Because I suggested something very similar to CMP when Dr Dobbs was failing in slow motion: codes with the magazine to gain access to online resources.
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm right there with you.
I've had several courses were all the homework was online. You could not pass the class without a code that came with a new textbook.
Of course you could buy that code separately, but it cost half as much as the textbook itself. This is very similar to game companies using online passes to attempt to get rid of the used market.
One other thing I should mention about all of these online homework systems. They SUCK. I have yet to see a truly good implementation of such a system. I'
"Professors have few incentives... (Score:3)
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Oh God... he was serious, wasn't he?
Uh, for the record, my bro's French text was a) useless and b) written by the department head. A copy was ordered for each and every student, and they sat in the bookstore all year until the teacher was advised that no one would receive their grades until they were gone because, hey, how could anyone have gotten through the coursework w/o the textbook? Right?
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example from an MIT course (Score:2)
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That's a very rosy view of the academe you have there. Let me guess, you went to an expensive university where the teachers' salaries are high enough that students' grades are non-"negotiable".
Re:example from an MIT course (Score:4, Funny)
Textbook companies are horrible (Score:2)
One of the reasons textbooks are largely reviled in academia is their ability to turn students off, drain their wallet and misinform (in some instances) all at the same time.
If the textbook industry implodes, I think celebration is in order. The quality and cost of education would likely improve.
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You're forgetting that like the rest of the government, education seems to be heavily controlled by the copyright cartels. How the hell did we let these people get this much money and power?
MPAA frames the news (Score:3)
the government [...] seems to be heavily controlled by the copyright cartels. How the hell did we let these people get this much money and power?
Getting elected to U.S. federal office requires the cooperation of the national news media. The national news media have become co-owned by the movie studios. Therefore, the movie studios get to frame the discussion any way they want [pineight.com].
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You're forgetting that like the rest of the government, education seems to be heavily controlled by the copyright cartels. How the hell did we let these people get this much money and power?
Because we've been giving our money to these people for over 80 years.Not to the artists. To the guy in the middle. Of course they are going to protect themselves: it's way too lucrative where they are.
There's only ONE thing politicians need more than "campaign donations": votes. Unfortunately, in the US electoral system (first past the post) and the SuperPACs etc, this is going to be hard. But at one point the Internet generations will outnumber the previous generations...
drm (Score:2)
Ok, so textbooks have DRM now, and education takes place in an MMO
style arena. So where are the cheat codes? Har. Anyway it's a format most kids
relate to.
"Hey you, stop texting in class!"
For Shame (Score:2)
All that illegal learning kids are doing these days. How dare they steal all of that information you own that someone else discovered!
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Control the means of delivery and you control the content. We don't want students wandering aimlessly around the internet, after all, learning things like evolution and climate science.
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We need a better way to distribute knowledge, one that is not based on maximizing the profit of people who have every incentive to restrict the flow of knowledge.
Wow. (Score:2)
There's not a single professor I know that would go for this. Especially the "web discussion" part being graded. It seems like a backdoor for publishers to try to co-opt or even replace the professors over time. "Don't hire a professor, sign a contract with us, we'll provide textbooks, grades, tests, the works, all you'll have to do is admin the system on your end."
"Cloud Classrooms", if you will.
Several professors do like the WebAssign style online homework systems, but only because TAs are at a premium
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Professors have a reason (Score:2)
They do have a reason; kickbacks.
1/2 the processors wrote the damned text book, so they have a vested interest in making student buy copies.
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As someone who just finished graduate school... (Score:2)
Most other professors, especially within engineering were more than helpful with either giving out the IS
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I hated this, and only encountered it once, in my Econ 102 class. We had to "buy" the online pass to view the online "textbook", which was really just a document wrapped in a flash applet, with "interactive" homeworks, that expired after 6 months. I asked the professor if he had another alternative, but he said I could always drop the class.
Which i would have done, and perhaps even picketed outside the classroom.
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I asked the professor
Look at you... even now sheltering "the professor". Name and shame, my friend; name and shame.
A Patent for this? (Score:2)
When Will Publishers Get It? (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems typical of the world of publishing today. Many publishers are merely money making machines, with little regard for either students, or knowledge. Unfortunately, as publishers adopt more and more predatory practices, they end up pissing off both students and professors. There is one major academic publisher in my field Cengage (who operate under many other names), whose books I now refuse to use. They update editions every three years, doing little more than changing page numbers and changing the order of exercises. Each new edition comes with a substantial price hike and force me to rework sections of my classes. The result of this? I now have the equivalent of an on-line text I have developed myself over the years. So, they have lost the business.
It is the very same publishing houses who are mean about sending us desk copies and charge us for them, if we do not adopt their texts. Again, they end up as losers, as there is no incentive to use their texts. They also get pissy when we sell the books that they send to us, without our asking. This again is silly. In the State in which I teach, professors have not had a pay rise in four years, so a few bucks to buy lunch was a welcome perk. Stopping this perk does not make us like them any more.
That being said, not all publishers are like this. Some keep their editions for a long time and do not change much when they bring out new editions. A good example of this is Oxford University Press. So, when I need to use a text for a class, all the business goes to OUP. This is the correct way to do business in publishing. It should not be about quarterly results, but rather about building and maintaining long term relationships. The technological innovation described in the post is just yet another step in the wrong direction. Eventually though, publishers will have to work out the errors of their ways, or perish./p
USPTO cleanup (Score:2)
rm -f `grep "system and method" `find /media/patents``
government should be working to make books cheap (Score:2)
Sometimes a patent can be good. (Score:3)
Since patents are used to limit the number of people who can do something, having a patent on something stupid will lead to limitations on the number of people doing said stupid thing.
The alternative is said stupid thing being a freely available technique that can be implemented at any time by anyone at no cost.
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Since patents are used to limit the number of people who can do something, having a patent on something stupid will lead to limitations on the number of people doing said stupid thing.
Think of it like a tax on stupid. "Sure, I'm happy to license this technology to you. All it requires is the small fee of $1000 per student per course, plus a minor administration fee per course per year of $25000. Just tack it onto your charges, which they'll have to pay in order to graduate. Profit!"
The fact that it would lead to students not taking the course in the first place would even be considered to be a good thing by many professors with tenure...
Few incentives (Score:2)
Professors have few incentives [...]
Until the book is written by that particular professor, who then requires its purchase in order to pass the class the professor is teaching.
Happens all the time in US universities, so in some cases there is a financial incentive for the professor to require the purchase of a particular book.
Right to Read (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I'm otherwise a huge fan of RMS, but I'm surprised I haven't seen any reference to the "Right to Read" in this discussion yet. Given the direction US copyright and education are going, it gets scarily closer every day.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [gnu.org]
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Oops, somehow had browsing set to 1, hence not seeing the couple ACs who posted the link...
Doh.
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I was actually hoping not to see this, as it has already been referenced on Slashdot far too many times and, as such, is boring, trite, and redundant. Please don't put this up again.
subject (Score:2)
Maybe make textbooks cost less than what a student can pay for food over two months and they'll start buying more of them.
Professors do not choose the text book (Score:2)
Many professors in universities, especially major research universities, do not necessarily have a say in what textbook they can get. In fact, there are very little choices as there are only three major publishers out there that provide senior-level text books. The decision on which textbook to use is made by the college board members as well as the professor.
The textbook industry is very lucrative. It's like pharmaceutical companies, they have sellers going around pushing the text book, etc.
I've taken s
battle.net for textbooks (Score:2)
This is battle.net for textbooks, how is this patentable?
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The goal is to make the bar to high for the casual 'infringer'. that it causes grief for customers, or that the hard core will still do it, isn't part of their concern.
And yes, it can be done, once the very hardware itsself to view and copy is locked down. ( think mandatory TPM )
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but the casual infringer can still download the copy the dude with talent ripped the drm out of or he can use the analog hole and ocr the book like people have been doing for years, or he could take a screen shot of each page of the book. this is just half-assed drm scheme that doesn't do any good anyway.
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My cynical self says that is true, but I remember in the past people saying that Internet censorship was impossible. Now, it is commonplace.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a son-of-ACTA bill brewing, where it wouldn't just do encryption, but signatures, so if something detects an unencrypted item (music/book/video/program), it would shut the device down, phone home, and call the local popo on a "IP tampering" violation.
DRM is improving. It took a long time for the iPhone 4s to be jailbroken. It took
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ROFL
Oh. You were serious.
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this is simply one-time use serial numbers with a form of online activation -- as is already done with many video games and such use predates this bullshit patent's filing date.
also... books are meant to be *shared*.. and borrowed, and lent, and resold... these are fundamental rights of first sale. so suck on that, mr. vogel. forcing each student to buy their own (new) book (or 'secret code' found in said new book) should be illegal.
it's bad enough when textbooks get "revised" every year and profs (or the d
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Remember when the The Right to Read was paranoid ravings about stuff that could never happen, taken to a comically absurd extreme?