Professors who put scanned copies of articles and chapters on reserve are being hounded for violating copyright. Publishers are insisting that everyone fork over the big bucks to pay for every new thought that by chance could enter a student’s brain. Never mind that there is obviously no one harmed by putting articles on reserve; quite the opposite: the author wants his or her material to be read and to have influence, else he or she would never have written in the first place. Here again, the case in question illustrates the absolute absurdity of conventional copyright as well as its unsustainability in a digital age.
I don’t know why authorities aren’t targeting the core problem, which is the student’s capacity to learn and recall information.
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I don’t know why authorities aren’t targeting the core problem, which is the student’s capacity to learn and recall information.
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Have you been to a government school? They’re doing a great job of destroying that capacity.
Forget information recall. You should see what they do to critical thinking ability. Don’t need to ask what a zombie apocalypse will look like because our schools are already pumping out new zombies every summer. No doubt ready to begin their patriotic debt accumulation in college to be indoctrinated into super zombies.
If anything learning and recalling facts and figures is the least of our concerns.
“patriotic debt accumulation”
You should coin this phrase.
If you are especially cynical, you may enjoy this page. There’s tons of cool stories like “I spent $177,000 going to a private art school, and apparently I’m supposed to pay it back.”
“patriotic debt accumulation”
You should coin this phrase.
If you are especially cynical, you may enjoy this page. There’s tons of cool stories like “I spent $177,000 going to a private art school, and apparently I’m supposed to pay it back.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/22/college-debt_n_471023.html?slidenumber=J8dg25iZqUE%3D&slideshow#slide_image
“…the author wants his or her material to be read and to have influence, else he or she would never have written in the first place.”
Obviously, if they were putting up such a fuss their intention was to get paid not be read or gain influence.
It is not the author who is complaining, but the publisher… and the root of the problem is the government force behind the whole equation.
Humans will seek knowledge and so if interventionism strangles access to information from ‘traditional’ sources then the irresistable drive will be to find sources that do not restrict the flow of knowledge.
Ironically when people find the Mises site they will be ecstatic to not only find knowledge but they will instantly recognize the perversity of the so-called knowledge that they were previously exposed to.
When people are ignorant they are malleable. Feed them intellectual junk food and all capacity for rational and intelligent discourse is destroyed. Wonderful way to maintain control of a population.
Controlling information flow is another method for allowing people to think they’re educated but keeping truly “radical” ideas out of their reach.
This is not new. In the early 1980s I heard about a teacher at a major university music school who was in the habit of photocopying Bach chorales in the library, which he used for studying and teaching. Of course the chorales are not copyrighted and never have been, but that didn’t prevent the music publisher from paying a spy to hang around the music library until he had enough dirt to take the prof to court for violating their copyright on the “edition”, the typesetting and the little articulation and dynamic markings they had added, or whatever. According to the story he had to pay a huge amount, in the thousands, and then had to buy his own copies of the music volumes (costing in the hundreds) so that he could continue to use them for his job.
I’m guessing that the music publisher recovered maybe 1/10 of their expenses in spying on and prosecuting the poor bird. And it didn’t make a damn bit of difference because whenever I visited the library the photocopiers were humming away as students and teachers copied the music they needed.
Around the same time a film studies prof at the same U. had his entire personal collection of classic movies on videotape erased and discarded by zealous librarians, because he was foolish (or dedicated) enough to have left them at the library for his students to use for research. Good thing they nipped that “copying movies” thing in the bud ‘way back then, because if they hadn’t then just think of what the world would be like now!
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