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posted by CoolHand on Monday March 13 2017, @11:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the information-wants-to-be-free dept.

Back in September last year, Mike wrote about the remarkable court ruling in India that copyright is not inevitable, divine or a natural right. As we have been reporting since 2013, the case in question was brought by three big Western publishers against Delhi University and a photocopy shop over "course packs" -- bound collections of photocopied extracts from books and journals that are sold more cheaply than the sources. Although the High Court of Delhi ruled that photocopying textbooks in this way is fair use, that was not necessarily the end of the story: the publishers might have appealed to India's Supreme Court. But as the Spicy IP site reports, they didn't:

In a stunning development, OUP, CUP and Taylor & Francis just withdrew their copyright law suit filed against Delhi University (and its photocopier, Rameshwari) 5 years ago! They indicated this to the Delhi high court in a short and succinct filing made this morning.

This withdrawal brings to an end one of the most hotly contested IP battles ever, pitting as it did multinational publishers against academics and students. The law suit was filed as far back as 2012 and it dragged on for 5 long years!

[...] That's an important point. So often it seems that copyright only ever gets longer and stronger, with the public always on the losing side. The latest news from India shows that very occasionally, it's the public that wins.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170309/07340536878/photocopying-textbooks-is-fair-use-india-western-publishers-withdraw-copyright-suit-against-delhi-university.shtml


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @04:45AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14 2017, @04:45AM (#478762)

    IMHO free college is a non starter, too many unqualified idiots will sign up thinking "jobs, hell yeah!!" but won't be willing to/be capable of doing the coursework.

    That's almost already the case. However, instead of being incapable of doing the coursework, many of the unqualified idiots are actually capable of doing the coursework because a grand majority of colleges have next to no standards. Our society is hostile towards real education; schools are encouraged to train people to become worker drones, rote memorization is confused with understanding, education is seen as a mere means to an end (good jobs and money), and assignments are one-size-fits-all.

    As long as you force colleges to sharply raise their standards, free college wouldn't necessarily greatly increase the amount of anti-intellectuals who attend,

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  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:16PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:16PM (#479031) Homepage

    Yes, this one right here -- in new America's preschool-themed "everybody gets a medal for showing up to the race" degrees are handed out similarly, especially now because it's racist to give people failing grades or not allow them to arbitrarily skip exams because "stress from the election" or whatever.

    Somewhat related, you wouldn't believe how many engineering grads are taking work as techs because corporations are looking for no less than 3 years' direct industry experience, for all shades of STEM grads. There's a reason why corporations are being more and more silent about the "lack of qualified graduates" while they're not even giving recent grads the time of day -- while hiring more and more H1-B subhumans.

    The corporations preach diversity and inclusion as a way to insinuate that critics of their H1-B use are racist, as well as to justify bringing in more H1-B hires - but are not very diverse at all. Their populations are overwhelmingly White and Chink, often with a significant Indian H1-B army component. But Blacks are still underrepresented, unless you count those imaginary Google Doodles that imply that our space program is run entirely by Blacks.