Every Bit of Ink

Textbook piracy a growing concern

Cassandra Jowett
Published in The Ryersonian on October 8, 2008

Textbook publishers are embedding new technologies in their products so they cannot be copied and shared between students — online and in real life.

Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) can ensure, using locks and encryptions, that e-books and other digital copyrighted material packaged with textbooks will not be printed, copied or shared. However, TPMs can also be applied to the pages of hard copy books by printing with special paper, ink and watermarks so they can’t be scanned or photocopied.

Jacqueline Hushion, the executive director of external relations for the Canadian Publishers’ Council (CPC), said publishers are researching and employing these technologies in response to the growing trend of students downloading scanned textbooks from websites for free instead of buying the books in hard copy.

“The peer-to-peer file sharing issue is a huge issue,” Hushion said. “It’s not only illegal, but it’s not fair to practise the scanning and uploading of intellectual property. They’re taking bread off of someone else’s table.”

The CPC represents the interests of approximately 20 Canadian publishing companies that publish books for all levels of education, including universities. Member publishers include McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Oxford University Press and Pearson Education Canada.

The organization hired a consulting firm to collect statistics on how peer-to-peer file sharing is affecting the publishing industry. “Many students think they should get everything for free because it’s available online,” Hushion said. “But publishers and professors still want students to have a book in their hands.

“The textbook is not going the way of the dodo bird. It’s not going to happen.”

Meanwhile, Ryerson history instructor Ross Fair said he has stopped using textbooks and readers for most of the classes he teaches, opting to give students access to material and links on Ryerson’s Blackboard online system, Google Books and online scholarly journals. This way, he says, students aren’t forced to download illegally or pay money they don’t have for books. “From my point of view, posting things on Blackboard has the highest rate of readership.”

Fair said he likes the flexibility of posting course material online. “If you want to change something on the fly, you have the opportunity.” He said his students appreciate the convenience and cost-effectiveness of having all their class readings posted online.

But for most students, textbooks are still assigned in each of their classes and hundreds of thousands of students from all over the world are opting to download them from torrent websites.

Just one of those websites, textbooktorrents.com, has more than 100,000 registered users and almost as many files available to download. Some individual titles have been downloaded up to 3,000 times. It is not required for a user to list a country when they register on the website, but 6,700 have indicated they live in Canada.

The website’s administrator, who goes by the alias “Geekman,” said he does not ask students which university they attend: “Privacy is a major concern on this site.”

Geekman said he will never associate his real name or location with the website for security reasons. Even the domain name is registered under false addresses and telephone numbers located in Saskatoon and a small town in California.

“I started Textbook Torrents in January, 2007 in response to the increasingly exploitive prices of textbooks,” he said. “The site is about more than a free lunch, but support for an ideal.” He said the cost of attending university should be financially accessible for all students.

However, not everyone agrees. The website was offline for part of the summer because a group of publishers contacted his host and domain name registrar asking them to take it down. Geekman’s account was suspended and it took him almost a month to get it up and running again on a different server.

“If there existed a conscionable business model in the textbook industry, I would happily shut the site down. I would love it if Textbook Torrents simply collected dust as students happily paid reasonable prices for their educational materials,” he said.

“Until then, we’ll be around, and there will be more to come.”

Canadian Federation of Students representative Ben Lewis said when students illegally download textbooks, it is a symptom of the frustration they are facing due to the rising cost of education. “Students don’t understand why they have to buy new textbooks year after year,” he said.

Lewis acknowledges that copying and sharing a book in its entirety is illegal, but he said there needs to be a balance between that and preventing students from copying at all.

“It’s ridiculous that a student can’t make a few copies for group members,” he said.

Current copyright laws allow students and faculty to copy a small percentage of a publication without permission for educational purposes, as long as it is not being resold. However, TPMs would put a stop to that.

Bill C-61, an amendment to the Copyright Act that was tabled earlier this year in Parliament but died when Prime Minister Stephen Harper called the federal election on Sept. 7, would have fined individuals up to $20,000 for getting around TPMs and making copyrighted material, including textbooks, available online.

Hushion said the CPC’s member publishers are pushing for a similar bill to be passed in the next session of Parliament and she expects it to become law in the near future.

Lewis said he thinks technological locks on publications violate the rights of students. “We should not be giving private corporations the absolute right to determine how materials they publish are used,” he said.