Publishing industry tackles digital rights

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They're manufacturing the problem, not imagining it.

--" Educational publishers, for example, face the prospect of a whole product line being wiped out from a few file swaps. Carline Haga, director of the global rights group for textbook publisher Thomson Learning, said the publisher's biggest copy protection headaches come from illicit copies of the sample test questions teachers get as part of a textbook package.

One purloined test key can mean a book has to be junked, Haga said, resulting in a potential loss of $20 million for a popular textbook. "We've seen more and more of these teacher solution manuals showing up on peer-to-peer networks, eBay and other places," she said. "Once that happens, it can kill a textbook...It means we're in a position where our biggest concern isn't protecting the things we sell, but the things we give away."--

The gist of the text above is: "We put tests in the books. If people copy the tests, then our textbooks are worthless." The problem with that line of reasoning is that it assumes that the only tests for the material in the book comes from the same book. Any competent, and not a few incompetent, teachers can can generate a test covering the material in the book without resorting to the use of any questions from the book.

All of this is moot anyway. The copying of material from a textbook is covered under the Fair Use provisions of copyright law. The online sharing falls into the same legal grey area that online music sharing does. The legality of sharing files containing copyrighted material has not been decided here in the USA. In Canada, it's perfectly legal to download copyrighted material, but the hosting of same has not been determined.

Posted by: Letophoro   Posted on: 08/19/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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