Monday, September 22, 2014

Even stealing, the universities lose money


For years, cost-cutting universities have taken the position that for them stealing is "fair," so they should just take the intellectual property their faculty members need to teach with. Sadly, CAUT and the student organizations have been company unions on this and supported the whole play.

Funny, now that universities are not paying Access Copyright, the rightsholders collectives, for rights to use copyright material, somehow the students' copying fees are going steeply... up, according to this story in the U of T Varsity newspaper.  I guess if it's okay to appropriate from writers and publishers, they might as well steal from students too.  An official "explains":
Some students are paying for materials that are available in the library catalogue for free because we have a licence for them. The idea here is most certainly to keep costs to students under control
Say again?
 
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