The book industry

The book industry, when faced the problem of file-sharing, used to raise a lot of questions about both moral aspects of the issue and certain circumstances sprung in a special context.   Today students have a possibility to share textbooks, and other related materials via several online services, from the BitTorrent trackers to Facebook's new Group feature, for instance.

 However, it seems that the things are getting too complicated for the students. The matter is that Joseph Hengry Vogel, an economics professor, was granted a new patent which will help him stop this behavior among students to share or lend textbooks both online or offline.  Many would agree that the talk about getting your hands on a college degree is the talk about business, where the main idea to stop the impulse of sharing course-books is to discourage people by lowering their grades. 

According to Joseph Hengry Vogel, the university staff is increasingly turning a blind eye when students appear with photocopied pages or facilitate piracy by placing texts in the library reserve, thus allowing others to photocopy them. Vogel also believes that borrowing or reselling is piracy as well, because it threatens the publishing industry. In other words, a student who wants to acquire a book from the local library may be not moral at all.  On the other side, if you buy a second-hand book, it's OK as long as you also buy the access code for a "discount" rate.

 It's both double fun for readers and double money for publishers. Anthem Press of London also supports the idea and shows quite the interest with this system. The experts point out that in case the system in question is really embraced, the lending system for books may just fall like a house of clay.

The only question here is who is checking on publishers? Undoubtedly, most students in the world had experienced this situation at least once in their life, (and this is especially true for college and university professors) that they were charged by the college not so friendly prices for the professors' own books "or else" the grade at the exam would substantially drop. However, this is the kind of information that doesn't often reach the media, so in case no-one writes about this, it is believed to not exist.