Utterly Meaningless

Daryl, seeing as UT students are attending a university subsidized by theft (i.e. taxation), one can understand the ethical confusion.

My partner goes to a university in Houston. He wanted a required book for a class, but due to a family emergency, we didn’t have the money for it just then. No used copies were available, becuase they had just changed to a new edition.

Fortunately, many copies of the old edition were still available for checkout from the school library. He got by on that (and just a few pages of copies from the helpful teacher) until we were able to buy his book. He has an A in the class.

My point is that people who mean well can usually find a workaround that doesn’t involve outright theft.

Something else to consider is that he really wanted the book–intended to keep it and use it later in his career. We value books at our house and we keep them for reference and entertainment. Many other students think of their textbooks as a commodity to be used up and discarded. Naturally they aren’t going to value them.

There does seem to be some basic lack of economic understanding on the part of the textbook pricing activists:

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I have to disagree with you on this one. Universities are notorious for overcharging students for books, and university departments conspire with publishers to release ‘new editions’ of texts (which are usually ‘old editions’ with one or two minor modifications) in order to keep their profits up. There is nothing ethical about that. Kudos to the UT students who took the initiative and used their heads to save their money!

Then, Jason, you probably won’t mind if, the next time I need to rent a car, I simply come to your house and take yours for the weekend. After all, I’d be showing initiative and saving my money!

Hmm, let’s see. Buying a book and duplicating it for personal use vs. Grand Theft Auto — kind of a disingenuous comparison, if you ask me. There is no law against making photocopies. Last time I checked, it *is* illegal to ‘borrow’ somebody’s car without permission.

My point here is that university bookstores are exploiting a captive audience in order to maximize profits. It’s analagous to movie theatres charging $3.75 for a small beverage. Thrifty people bring their own beverage in a purse or bag – in short, they use their heads.

Bookstores have been cheating students for years, now. It’s about time that students defend themselves from unfair treatment in a measured, rational, and LEGAL way: which the UT students seem to be doing.

Bookstores have been cheating students for years, now. It’s about time that students defend themselves from unfair treatment in a measured, rational, and LEGAL way: which the UT students seem to be doing.

WRONG! Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

the nature of the copyrighted work;

amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I’m pretty sure that copying the entire book would violate the third point. Why do you think the kids are going into Mexico to get the photocopying done? Because no copy store in the US would allow it. Why? Because it’s illegal!

Jason:

They aren’t buying books and copying them for personal use — they’re buying them, copying them, then returning them. First sentence of the story:

South Texas college students looking to save money are heading to Mexico to copy their textbooks before returning them for a refund.

In other words, stealing.

And Daryl’s right — fair use most certainly does not cover copying an entire text.

But let’s try to make this a constructive discussion. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that “university bookstores are exploiting a captive audience in order to maximize profits”? Do university bookstores in fact enjoy higher profit margins than trade bookstores? Do they enjoy higher profit margins than other kinds of retail?

sheesh – why don’t all the students in the class chip in and buy one book and make copies for everyone..
this is too funny.. especially the part about going to Mexico to do the copying because it isn’t illegal there..

You know – I understand the copyright part and stuff.. but these book sellers really are ripping off the students and it was just a matter of time before stuff like this began happening..

and what does one expect from the generation that produced ideas like Napster?? after all didn’t the g-schools go out of their way to teach the young’uns to share?

Socialism.. whats yours is mine…
the ideology was planted and it flourishes..

Being at uni, I can understand not wanting to pay huge prices for textbooks (which, depending on the subject, are often of the sort that you only need to read once). But copying an entire book is both wrong and stupid – it would probably cost nearly as much in time as it would in money either way (sorry fo the confused sentence).
So they should do what I do. Borrow the books from a library, read them, if you then feel you will need a copy beyond the semester, buy that book, if not, reborrow it as needed for the rest of the semester. I’ve saved several hundred dollars on this principle, and it is completely legal – and doesn’t mean I’m wasting all my time at a photcopier.

Daryl – Wasn’t aware of ‘Section 107,’ although I think it could easily be argued that the texts are being copied for ‘criticism, comment, scholarship, and research:’ a good student engages in all of these at one point or another. I take your point, though.

Because of the way college bookstores price their books (outrageous markup), it would be hard to prove any damage to the marketability of the book (beyond one lost sale for the bookstore). And let’s keep in mind that that same book goes right back on the shelf to be sold to some other student, who (in all fairness) may or may not go down to Mexico to get the thing photocopied.

Which brings me to Tim’s point. Although I haven’t done research or analysis to support my case, college bookstores do *not* function like normal bookstores (or normal retail stores, for that matter). I went to the community college bookstore with my wife on Monday, where she purchased the required text for an into psych course (250 pages, soft cover, $80.25). Once classes are over, she has 5 calendar days to sell the book back to the bookstore for about 30% of what she paid. That book will then be re-sold to the next batch of students as a ‘used’ text for about 60-75% of its original price.

And so it goes. College bookstores sell their books at an inflated price to begin with (where else would you pay $80 for a softcover book as dull as that?), then ‘buy’ them back, then sell them again. And don’t even get me started on the tax breaks and subsidies involved.

The lesson here, of course, is that ‘the house always wins.’ Except at UT, where students are exploiting gaps in the law (or more properly, law enforcement) to their fiscal advantage. To me, this situation is somewhat similar to American citizens on fixed incomes buying prescription meds over the counter in Canada and Mexico. These people are cheating the pharmaceutical companies, but I don’t think anybody feels too much pity for giants like Pfizer or Merck. And why not? Because everybody knows that they charge too much for their products, and that this gouging continues with blessings (or at least a nod and a wink) from the federal government.

Jason, the price of textbooks is driven by many factors. Book for book, textbooks cost more to research, more to write, more to compile, and more to print (including particularly unusual and intense copyediting, typesetting, and proofreading, many more pages, and larger format) than the average mass-market book, and probably cost just as much to advertise and market. For all this effort, the target market is pretty small–vanishingly tiny for many textbooks. So you wind up with a sky-high production cost per copy compared with that of mass-market books.

One solution that a professor or two of mine used was to write a book of their own, take it down to Kinko’s, and have it printed and bound. We would drop by the Kinko’s near campus to get it, since they kept it in stock there. I guess we paid about a third the price of a regular textbook, for about half the quality of a regular textbook. :/