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Education DRM

Today's 'Day Against DRM' Protests Locks On Educational Materials (defectivebydesign.org) 16

Posted by EditorDavid from the locks-on-learning dept.
This year's "International Day Against DRM" is highlighting user-disrespecting restrictions on educational materials.

An anonymous reader quotes the Free Software Foundation's Defective By Design site: The "Netflix of textbooks" model practiced by Pearson and similar publishers is a Trojan horse for education: requiring a constant Internet connection for "authentication" purposes, severely limiting the number of pages a student can read at one time, and secretly collecting telemetric data on their reading habits.

Every year, we organize the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) to mobilize protests collaboration, grassroots activism, and in-person actions against the grave threat of DRM. For IDAD 2019, we are calling on Pearson and similar companies to stop putting a lock on our learning, and demonstrate their alleged commitment to education by dropping DRM from their electronic textbooks and course materials. At the same time, it is our plan to show that a better world is possible by encouraging people to contribute to collaborative and DRM-free textbooks, and resist the stranglehold these publishers are putting on something as fundamental as one's education. To help us, join the Defective by Design (DbD) coalition as we organize local and remote hackathons on free culture educational materials, and an in-person protest of Pearson Education on Saturday, October 12th.
The group is joined in this year's event by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and The Document Foundation (as well as 10 other participating organizations). Here's some of the site's suggestions for ways to participate:
  • In Boston, we'll be leading the way with our own demonstration on October 12th, 2019, at Pearson Education's corporate offices, followed by an evening hackathon on collaborative, freely licensed educational materials... We'll be providing activists around the world with support on how they can stage their own local in-person event, as well as how to join us online while we help improve the free and ethical alternatives to educational materials restricted by DRM.
  • The easiest way to participate is to join us in going a Day Without DRM, and resolve to spend an entire day (or longer!) without Netflix, Hulu, and other restricted services to show your support of the movement. Document your experiences on social media using the tags "#idad" or "#dbd", and let us know at info@defectivebydesign.org if you have a special story you'd like us to share.
  • Print and share our dust jacket design, which you can slip over your "dead tree" books (while you still have them) to warn others of the dangers of ebook DRM. Pass them out at coffee shops, libraries, and wherever readers congregate!

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Today's 'Day Against DRM' Protests Locks On Educational Materials More

Today's 'Day Against DRM' Protests Locks On Educational Materials

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  • Don't forget the locks on "open" knowledge sources (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Saturday October 12, 2019 @10:58AM (#59299682)
    Wikipedia and it's free textbook service Wikibooks has locks in the form of biased and and abusive admins and delete knowledge on so called notability grounds. They will have millions of stub articles in Cebuano but they won't let you have articles on women scientists. Until these "open locks" are defeated, then proprietary services have the advantage, just as the lack of progress in the GIMP and desktop Linux means that Adobe and Microsoft can push their malware.

  • I'm all for them doing this, but what good does it do on a Saturday? Nobody that should see any of this is even going to be in the office on a weekend.

  • DRM's heyday was when PlaysForSure was working. Now we've got streaming radio, walled garden subscriptions like Amazon Music, and watermarks from Apple and Amazon MP3.

    Nice reminder of Microsoft and Apple's DRM systems, but none of them work anymore.

  • The publisher eBook model is seriously flawed. They charge almost as much for the eBook as they do for the textbook and all the DRM paranoia they employ makes the ebook clunky and a pain to use, often each publisher has their own app to download the book if you want it offline. When I used a publisher textbook students would always come to my office lugging the heavy, physical textbook, only one or two used the electronic version. Once I had enough of my own notes available as PDF to largely replace the tex

    • Book costs have always been a part of college. I was lucky because I had some rich older friends who helped pay for them.

      You can't keep textbooks for the rest of your life... they'll be taken eventually. Rely on Dummies books for the must-know of the boiler plate topics like math, history, and science.

      Overall, DRM and devices that die on graduation day are part of the scheme. Cheap tuition? Must come with high fees.

      • Why even have DRM when you need new book each class

        • Because the "you must have version X released this year" line is a scam. If the information changes that quickly, the book is already out of date despite being current, and if it doesn't change that quickly there's no need to require the new version. Hence, the publishers enforce DRM so you can't resell the perfectly good book to the next round of students.

      • You can't keep textbooks for the rest of your life...

        That's not true if you become a professor. I still have several of the textbooks I had as an undergrad and I still use them when teaching the relevant courses.

  • student loan bankruptcies is the real way to fix this as the banks will be like no we can't take loans on $350 textbooks.

    • Uhm, that MasterCard display on campus can pay for books... oh, wait, they banned that!

      Bottom line, parents, buy your kids a Coverdell as they get their first money.

  • Above all my options, https://paperhelpers.org/ [paperhelpers.org] service has a very pleasing brand reputation. The final output was amazing and I can’t ask for any better papers. It has a competitive price and does live to meet high expectations. Keep it up!

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