After “awareness” campaigns that failed to move the needle for years, Denmark’s leading anti-piracy group is shifting to a more aggressive litigation strategy. The Rights Alliance confirmed it will begin filing civil lawsuits against individual students who are caught sharing even a single digital textbook. The anti-piracy group prefers not to mention the targeted platforms but says it uses undercover monitoring of private groups to gather evidence.
But nobody’s suing the schools for their textbooks-with-needless-“updates” extortion-rings?
OPEN TEXTBOOKS EXIST, & school-systems ought be legally-obliged to either use those, XOR justify coercing students into economic-abuse for sake of fancier ones.
OpenStax.org
LibreTexts.org
etc.
This SHOULD be cutting both-ways: lawsuits going up AND lawsuits going down.
Since it’s only axe-chopping-down, then … obviously, then the people doing the “representing” are NOT representing the citizens in their ridings, but rather the established-special-interest-groups who’re profiting from the extortion students are currently subject-to.
Fundamentally, beyond all copyright-law, platform-exclusivity, etc, fundamentally, IF G-D put immense LivingPotential in a life, THEN it’s our obligation to be honoring that LivingPotential.
NOT to be snuffing it unless money is concentrated to a particular class, or pseudoperson, or cartel, or institution:
It isn’t that “information wants to be free”, rather, it is that LEARNING ought be free, for upright, proper, honest learning ( not evil/abuse/similar ).
The Scandinavian system whereby nobody can buy their way into higher-education: it’s merit-ONLY, & the public-education-system cannot be bypassed by money/status, THAT is more right, but I’ve no idea how they do learning-materials/textbooks.
Further, it ought be that learning & certification are decoupled: one ought be able to get learning at any institution, or even on one’s own, & then get certification independently of that-school’s-institution.
“Conflict-of-interest is the root of corruption” is a good rule for understanding why learning & certification need to be segregated, to break the cartel-system from education.
( that does, of course, require standardization of required-learning-for-specific-certifications, & many might balk at that, but if driver’s-licenses & pilot’s-licenses can be standardized, then I’m willing to bet that degrees can be standardized, in many subjects, too. )
_ /\ _