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Woman Who Sold Access to Pirated Books on Dropbox Handed Suspended Sentence:
Pirated textbooks are relatively easy to find on the open web and via dedicated pirate sites. However, some people are creating their own libraries in an effort to make money, offering online access to such material in exchange for a fee.
[...] According to the [Rights Alliance (Rettighedsalliancen)] group, which acts on behalf of a wide range of copyright holders, publishers included, routine monitoring for pirated content drew its attention to an advert placed on Den Blå Avis (The Blue Newspaper), Denmark's largest buying and selling site.
For a fee of 20 kronor (US$2.91) it offered access to 115 digital copies of books usually sold by publishers including Gyldendal, Lindhardt and Ringhof, University of Southern Denmark, and Social Literature. The books were conveniently stored on Dropbox, with customers able to download them with minimum fuss. With assistance from local police, Rights Alliance was able to have the advert quickly removed but also managed to identify the seller, a woman from the Vanløse district of Copenhagen. The group said that the woman admitted to the unlawful distribution of the content, which included books dedicated to physiotherapy.
This week her fate was decided by a court in Nykøbing Falster, which reopened for business on Monday after a closure due to the coronavirus pandemic. Following a guilty plea, the court handed down a suspended sentence of 20 days in prison accompanied by a financial confiscation order.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:40PM (4 children)
The real crime is the mulcting of students with the typical educational textbook racket. Whenever I could, I always bought my textbooks used. This case is another one of those in which the little person gets punished, while the big and powerful are not only allowed to run rackets with impunity, but shown a sickening level of deference.
That anyone is able to make money by undercutting is merely a message that the system itself is broken. Academic publishing of research is an even worse racket. At upwards of $2000, the "author pays" fees are outrageous. Never mind that it is the author who should be receiving money, not paying it. They ask so much money that a fair number of con artists have taken note and set up their own fraudulent research journals solely for the purpose of collecting those fees, offering a substantial discount to lure researchers in. Might ask "only" $200. They might well accept every submission, rejecting only if there's a need to do so for show. Why not? And laugh all the way to the bank.
But I don't blame them so much as I blame the publishers and academics for having created this golden opportunity for exploitation. Bring on Plan-S!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 06 2020, @07:26AM (2 children)
They'll close that loophole when all textbooks will only be available digitally.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 06 2020, @03:50PM
They wish! Can't be done. DRM simply does not work. Enforcing artificial scarcity through the law is also hopeless. Only thing that props copyright up now is the public's wishes that artists not starve, and a bit of inertia. Publishers have come close to losing that good will, with the RIAA pulling those stupid terrorism campaigns, and things such as the wiping out of music, movie, and book collections at a stroke because the DRM was online and the service that does the checking was shut down. In addition to raising questions about copyright itself, such dirty dealing fans the flames of anti-intellectualism.
Just your fear talking.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 06 2020, @08:01PM
The primary reason for textbooks to be available digitally is to keep them up to date. Printed textbooks, especially used ancient books from last semester, are too outdated to be suitable for use in education.
Imagine the pandemonium if textbooks are not updated:
Please don't support people re-using ancient text books from the previous semester or school year. They are full of misleading obsolete information.
This message is a public service of academic text publishers everywhere.
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06 2020, @10:12PM
That's so 2000s. Now every student has a PDF from somewhere. Sometimes for nostalgia, I'll still buy a dead-tree version. New ones aren't around $200 like they were when I was an undergrad 25 years ago, more like around $70, but I'll buy a used copy for $15.
When I saw some textbooks during my professor's office hours that I thought were useful for our class, I found full PDFs that our library system was providing, and put links on our Piazza site.
Of course, the yearly fee the library system pays to the content mafia for flat rate access is concerning. Physical books are disappearing from libraries all over, replaced with student cafés and makerspaces, but from what I heard Cornell pays $100m a year to have access to digital content.