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A comment on High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Students.

Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by giantg2 on Sunday June 04, 2023 @12:33PM (#36186986)
Guess what? You do not need to buy textbooks if you have a smart professor that cares and isn't into the racket.

You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!

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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by aio2 on Sunday June 04, 2023 @12:46PM (#36187100)
How would you be able to pick and cover specific covers without buying the book?
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by giantg2 on Sunday June 04, 2023 @01:13PM (#36187359)
The library, potentially. The other option that I've seen is that the professor buys one copy of the books and then copies the parts they want so they can distribute to the students.
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by aio2 on Sunday June 04, 2023 @01:26PM (#36187483)
Oh, okay.
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by ketkev on Sunday June 04, 2023 @01:17PM (#36187410)
The teacher/professor would be able to buy the book and can then copy and hand out the parts they are actually using for their classes.
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by xur17 on Sunday June 04, 2023 @01:29PM (#36187519)
I wonder if you can use 15% from each "edition" (since they're all basically the same anyways).
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by IshKebab on Sunday June 04, 2023 @01:42PM (#36187635)
No. The law generally doesn't stand for "aha, but what if I ..." tricks.
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by cultureswitch on Sunday June 04, 2023 @07:06PM (#36190406)
It's an interesting question though. Because the publishers will invariably argue that each edition is different. If the editions are different, then surely you can get 15% of each.
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by IshKebab on Monday June 05, 2023 @05:26PM (#36203935)
They only argue that they are different for face-saving reasons ("we're not milking you, honest!"). There's no legal reason they need to be different.
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by dehrmann on Sunday June 04, 2023 @02:18PM (#36188023)
A smart professor is the one who wrote the book they sell to their own class.
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Re:High Prices Make Textbook ‘Piracy’ Acceptable to Most Stu... by mhb on Sunday June 04, 2023 @04:56PM (#36189510)
Right. Not only does that bastard Gil Strang keep updating with new editions, he also is the publisher!
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