Tough Times Ahead for Textbook Torrents

Posted on July 1, 2008
Filed Under News, The Daily Prereq | By Max Baumgarten

No one ever said the life of a textbook torrent was a breeze. Having to get scanned onto a computer, page-by-page, your tedious birth is nothing less than time-consuming. You are constantly being compared to music pirating, even though you’re never going to be as culturally important or sexy as your counterpart. And now you’re running into pesky legal troubles. While college kids are illegally downloading textbooks instead of shelling out the Benjamin Franklins for a book they might not ever open, publishing houses are accusing websites like TextbookTorrents.com of copyright infringement. TextbookTorrents has 5,000 textbooks available for download in original layout design and illustration, but on their website today, they hinted that they may not be up for a drawn-out legal battle:

On Friday, we received a request from Pearson Education, one of the bigger textbook publishers, listing 78 torrents that they wanted disabled. While they are acting on extremely shaky legal ground, we are not in a position to fight a legal battle with the organization.

Come on, TextbookTorrents, some hotshot lawyer throws down legal mumbo-jumbo like “intellectual property” and “infringement,” and you guys are basically ready to pack up shop. Lame. This is what I don’t get: TextbookTorrents has 5,000 books at their disposal, and it’s hard to believe that none of them explain how to protect yourself from getting sued. Put your resources to good use and start reading up on the law of the land.

(Source: Chronicle of Higher Education)

  • Share/Save/Bookmark

Comments

2 Responses to “Tough Times Ahead for Textbook Torrents”

  1. Online Textbooks Tell Real Textbooks to Shut Up : theprereq.com on July 10th, 2008 3:21 pm

    […] Mr. Baumgarten’s recent post about a major lawsuit being filed against one of these online textbook companies, USA Today reports […]

  2. Upstart Start-Up to Offer Free Textbooks : theprereq.com on July 18th, 2008 10:29 am

    […] of charge to undergrads at 15 colleges this fall. Innovations such as Amazon’s Kindle and the fledgling TextbookTorrents.com have both made solid attempts to offer textbooks for the masses. But Flat World Knowledge is unique […]

Leave a Reply




Security Code: