Arrgh…Parents Beware of Your College Student Pirating Textbooks

By Righty

College will be starting again soon.  For some of you parents, it will be your first experience in sending a student away.  Books are expensive.  You may leave the task of book buying on the shoulders of your freshman student.  They may hear that the book they need is “free online ” and may be tempted to download it and save their money for something else.  Why not download it and “share” the file as they may have done in the past with some of their music files?

There are plenty of textbook files to be found on the Internet…the files are free..but they are illegal.  And while downloaders aren’t being prosecuted yet, as music file downloaders are, those who post the textbook files on their websites are being warned of the legal consequences of offering these files. 

Faced with soaring prices for textbooks, cash-strapped students have discovered a tempting, effective, but illicit alternative – pirated electronic books, available for free over the Internet.

“We think it’s a significant problem,” said William Sampson, manager of infringement and antipiracy at Cengage Learning Inc., a reference book publisher in Farmington Hills, Mich. Sampson said that in any given month, 200 to 300 of the company’s titles are posted illegally as free Internet downloads. Distributing books for free without permission violates copyright laws and deprives publishers of revenue.

It’s not just textbooks that are being downloaded improperly. Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at the Association of American Publishers in New York, said a survey in May located about 1,100 titles available illegally online, including novels and books on current events.

The pirating of textbooks, along with movies and music, goes way back, and if you read the entire article referenced above you saw China and Russia were mentioned as countries where this is commonplace.  But penalties are quite strict in countries like China.

Chinese Sentenced for Pirating Textbooks