seriously, intellectual property theft is theft

[chelseagirl]

Reposted from my FB:

I'm struggling here. Some very sweet, very young students said something yesterday that really got under my skin. So I'm venting here because they are definitely good kids and I don't want to take it out on them. But.

They don't want to buy the textbook for the First Year Writing class. I get it -- textbooks have become absolutely predatory in their pricing, and even though ours is the most affordable, they see it as another drop in the overflowing bucket. But as we discussed it, I mentioned that a student in my literature class was asking whether the novels would be available as PDFs.

My students didn't seen anything wrong with that. They got that I would not want to scan a 500 page book, but not that it was theft of someone's intellectual property. That writing is someone's livelihood and that books don't just magically jump from our fingers. That it hardly seems an imposition to ask students to buy a handful of paperbacks that are available for under $20 apiece and in ebook form for even less than that.

My students are going to become engineers and computer professionals and doctors. They would not expect people to take their work for free. Why do they see the written word so differently?

Comments

[oracne]

They don't know any writers and think books appear by magic?

[ancarett]

I find the resistance to doing so particularly increases for older works. Then they dredge up a nigh unreadable ebook version which is sometimes bowdlerized or abridged. Then we have to tackle why trying on variant editions can be problematic.

What's been most successful is to get an ebook in the library. Sadly,many still don't read.

[greenwoodside]

Sorry, lurking librarian here. Does your college library have a patron-driven buying scheme? One where students can request books and the library buys them in? Just a thought.

V. sad that your students don't get the reasons for copyright. YouTube/Spotify/on-tap access to free or cheap entertainment hasn't helped.

[corvidology]

I think it has everything to do with the myth that everything is freely accessible on the internet, right? I mean, there are no laws forbidding it, natch, and digitization is a process that has no expenses involved so what's the problem there?

If I hear one more student complain 'why isn't X digitized like EVERYTHING else is?' I'm going to scream.

[conuly]

Do they not have access to any form of ILL?

[kore]

Yeah, "I should just have immediate access to and ability to download any book, song, movie, or paper I want with minimal effort and no cost to me" is only killing journalism and crippling small presses/midlist authors and let's not even talk about musicians and streaming....I blame the white dudes who got to set up the internet ethos in the first place with the "Wild West information wants to be free now everyone is a publisher!!" bullshit which we're all still paying the price for, generations later.

[senmut]

+sighs at it all+

[havocthecat]

Not that it's fun to do, but "IP theft is still theft" might actually need to be a part of your course?

[malinaldarose]

Pity you can't require them to participate in NaNoWriMo to give them an idea of how many hours it takes to write a first draft.

[lunabee34]

It's a real problem. I completely agree. And I don't really know quite how to combat it either.

[amaka]

Small happy anecdote?

In the theater for Shang-Chi, I overheard a teenage brother explain to a very little brother that the reason they had to pay to watch Shang-Chi in the theater, and buy snacks, and not watch it online without paying -- which the little brother evidently knew how to do -- was so that Marvel would have enough money to make another Spider-Man movie. The little brother scoffed that Marvel didn't get their money; the theater got their money. Nope, the older brother said; this is how Marvel gets its money, and if you want more Spider-Man...

Granted the complexities between Sony & Disney, and who gets the snacks money, yay, teenage brother!

[trepkos]

Can they not buy them secondhand from last year's students? (Not that it helps the writer any, if they do that.)