Legal Geek No. 12: Students Lose as College Textbook Market Gets Desperate

This week, the subject is whether textbook publishers will succeed in destroying unfavorable parts of copyright law, or the consumers supporting the business of college textbooks itself.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp12

College textbook publishers have long wielded every protection possible under copyright law to try and discourage the resale market as well as counterfeits, citing second hand stores as serious threats to the industry. However, one limit in copyright law is the First Sale Doctrine, which serves to exhaust the publisher's right to control resale of the physical goods after selling them to the first purchaser. This has long been the worst enemy of this very lucrative entire industry.

But will recent actions by publishing companies overcome this First Sale Doctrine problem?

Rather than embracing more digital distribution models such as the music industry and the videogame industry to combat resale, textbook publishers have chosen to double down on high prices and force student consumers into impossible choices.  Aspen has begun e-mailing law school professors to inform them that the next editions of their popular textbooks will come with a so-called lifetime access to a digital copy of the text, but the physical book must be returned to the publisher at the end of the class.  In other words, students pay an exorbitant $200 or so for a book that they will not really own, and is not really sellable or useable by second hand shops and libraries.

If there's anything the tech world has learned over time, it is not to trust so-called lifetime digital access from providers such as this. Plus, the publishers are touting these added digital benefits come without increasing the cost of the book, but the price should actually be dramatically dropping if all the consumer gets is a temporary license to the physical copy and a questionable digital copy.

You can bet if this flies in the high-cost law school setting, all publishers will force this change down students' throats in all academic fields, and maybe even primary, secondary, and homeschool settings as well. Consumers will then really be paying money for nothing, and the publishers will rake in the profits while doing an end-run around the First Sale Doctrine established as early as 1904 and reconfirmed by the Supreme Court as recently as last year's term.

Bottom Line: Sometimes consumers need to step up and fight via petitions or supporting organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and this appears to be one of those times.  Otherwise, college and other schooling could become out-of-reach for the worst reasons possible: corporate greed and profit margins.

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