Stealing Textbooks is Now OK, and it’s the Big Publishers’ Fault
August 26, 2010
(Editor’s note: Andrew Bender is the President of Eleven Learning. His regular blog post, “These Go To Eleven,” appears periodically.)
Lifehacker recently posted some tips for saving money on textbooks. One suggestion was to photocopy them. The writer made no mention of any legal or moral concerns about doing this.
My immediate reaction was that Gawker bloggers will do pretty much anything in order to get page views. (See: Gizmodo and the iPhone 4.)
Let me get this out of the way: at Eleven Learning, our livelihoods are based on respect for intellectual property. If stuff costs money, we think people should either pay for it or do without.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to discuss why a big chunk of society sometimes decides it’s OK to stop paying for stuff.
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