[IvoDankolov]

    No access code means a lower grade, all in the best interests of science.

I ... no. I can't even...

I'm sorry, but I find it very hard to summon an inkling of sympathy for the publishers' plea against piracy when I see measures like that.

When I failed calculus because I didn't prove a theorem the way it was in the lecture notes and then was insane enough to argue the point, I thought it was pretty stupid. Here, I don't think the word even begins to describe the situation.

Commodity. That's a good way of describing the role of the students. It shows a rather alarming failure of the system that instead of incentivizing the pursuit of knowledge, students are set up for failure and milked for as much money as possible during their education.

I know a patent doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, and I do hope that most people in a position to make decisions in education call it out for being stupid, though I feel that's a tad optimistic. I'm just sad that a professor is the one proposing this. There go my non-existent beliefs in academia.

[antonb2011]

Don't worry about it, man. He can patent it all he wants, but thing is not gonna fly. It's called a "tie-in sale", and the United States Anti-Trust law prohibits it. McDonald's tried this trick a long time ago with their franchise owners in order to better account for how much they sold, by forcing them to buy paper cups and other supplies directly from Corporate (i.e. prohibiting third party suppliers). I think it got really high in courts, but eventually the franchise owners won.

[chris_wot]

In Australia it's called "restraint of trade" and is totally illegal. eBay tried to do something similar by forcing users to use PayPal and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) struck it down.

This patent might work in areas of the world that don't have much consumer protection, but they will NOT work in areas of the world that care about anti-competitive practices.

[chris_wot]

Argh! Not restraint of trade, "third line forcing" is the term! Oops.

[glogla]

I'm pretty sure that exact formulation is irony on part of torrentfreak author, not actual formulation of the "professor" (sorry, but if you pledged to promote science and knowledge and then do this, you get quotes around title).

Still, I agree completely.

[IvoDankolov]

Well, yes, and the scathing tone of it is pretty thick, at least when I read it in my head. I was commenting on the idea, not the exact wording of it. It's just the first appropriate quote that I grabbed from the text.

[impendia]

>I'm sorry, but I find it very hard to summon an inkling of sympathy for the publishers' plea against piracy when I see measures like that.

In addition to heartily endorsing planetguy's comment (as a university professor), I might point out that this guy doesn't speak for the publishing industry either.

He is just some random asshole who managed to game the patent system.

[bdonlan]

Of course, it's also possible this professor got the patent to ensure that nobody could use this technique. Unfortunately, many courses already are :/

[planetguy]

I'm just sad that a professor is the one proposing this. There go my non-existent beliefs in academia.

Most textbooks are written by professors. Or to put it another way, a tiny minority of professors write textbooks. This particular asshole appears to be a textbook-writing professor in a fifth-rate university (University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, anybody?) who writes things with bullshit-sounding titles like Amazonia in the Arts: Ecocriticism versus the Economics of Deforestation.

The vast majority of professors, of course, don't give a whit about increasing royalties for their textbook-writing brethren. While there's a few good textbooks which are worth having, I'd certainly never go out of my way to make sure that my students actually need to own the textbook in order to pass the course; that's just stupid.

[masklinn]

> This particular asshole appears to be a textbook-writing professor in a fifth-rate university (University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, anybody?) who writes things with bullshit-sounding titles like Amazonia in the Arts: Ecocriticism versus the Economics of Deforestation.

Yep, sounds like that teacher: the one who writes awful textbooks and mandates those books for his courses, shitting a new one every year to ensure a steady income stream.