Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
They should just point students to filesharing sites that have the material. It's effectively the same thing.
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Well, the main reason I think the school will win the case is a lot of the material is stuff students can get freely at the library and/or on the libraries website (most every decent scholarly journal is fully available electronically now).
The only catch will be making copies of a chapter of a book etc. But I think they can win that as it's a pretty reasonable argument that providing one chapter of a book won't stop any purchases. No professor is going to ask students to pay for a book to read one chapter, so there aren't lost sales. Hell, especially for graduate students, some may be interested in the book and want to read the rest and order a copy.
But pointing to file sharing sites is a huge no-no. With the focus of universities in educating students not to do illegal file sharing, there's a good chance a prof is going to have major consequences if they direct students to download something illegally.
And I'd never do it for moral reasons as I think one should buy material if they want a whole book etc. I just think fair use laws need to be clarified to allow for legitimate educational use of materials that aren't being stolen, or bootlegged and sold etc.