This has been previously published on ITToolbox here and this raises some seriously interesting questions about colleges, text books, and the culture of free sharing. Not sure if this is good, bad, or ugly.
With the high cost of textbooks, there is no surprise that a group has gotten together to develop and deliver a torrent site that deals with nothing but college text books.
Textbook torrents starts off on legally dubious grounds, but that is also highly likely not going to stop the explosion of this web site. It is not about student’s spending money on books, it is really about folks getting something for free, and in this case it is college text books. This is interesting because most of the colleges that I interact with on a daily basis have an e-resource process where the college text books can be downloaded for free by the students. Of course it comes with Adobe DRM, but in general, if you want an e-book, you can get it for free from the college. Or not really free, e-resources are built into the cost of the class, and you pay for them even if you don’t use them.
A note on the Torrent Textbooks site says that Pearson Education (one of the major suppliers of text books) issued a C&D (Cease and Desist) note to the web site which they honored. But in light of other torrent sites being forced to turn over IIS/Apache logs and user information they state with a well deserved bit of paranoia
This is not a happy day, but I want to take the opportunity to make a few comments. First, I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to prevent the server’s logs from falling into the hands of those that might use them against you. If that means bankrupting myself in the process, so be it. I would prefer that it not come to that, but I have drawn a line which I will not cross no matter the cost. In the next few days, I will be drafting an agreement that all users must accept in order to continue using the site. This will be mutual in nature, with both parties agreeing to abide by certain guidelines and to uphold certain responsibilities. It will hopefully put us all in a more comfortable legal position. Source: TextbookTorrents.com
Right now any bittorrent site that deals with any pirated information is in trouble, frankly they would have been better off making a subgroup at The Pirate Bay rather than striking out on their own. Expect the shut down very soon, or the raid by the textbook police.
Publishers are in new ground with people sharing book torrents; they have not generally taken the uber aggressive stances that the RIAA and MPAA have in the past. But if Textbook Torrents takes off, this might be the straw that starts the brutal backlash lawsuit frenzy ala RIAA/MPAA tactics.
So far the publishing group has not sought to take legal action against individual student downloaders, as the Recording Industry Association of America has done in its campaign to stamp out the illegal trading of music at colleges. The book-publishing group has not sought to shut down entire Web sites that offer downloads either, said Mr. McCoyd. Instead, officials are doing research on the extent of the problem and asking Web-site owners to remove individual files. “We’ve just tried to keep sweeping away these infringements as they continue to come online,” he said. Source: Chronicle.com
In all it is a good thing that the publishers have not gone after individual downloader’s, but as time moves on and this problem gets worst, maybe the book publishers will try something different. Co-opt, subscription services, anything would be better than the strong arm tactics that torrent users have seen in the past. This is not likely to go away, what will be interesting is to see how the publishers attempt to work with sites in the future.
In one of the weirdest looks at people’s thinking, let’s ask the audience first what does “Don’t be evil” mean to you. Did you immediately think of Microsoft, RIAA, and Big Oil? The Hillary Obama issues. Republicans? What did you think of, odds are highly likely you might have also thought of Google’s famous tag line. In an interview reported by Yahoo News comes along this tasty tidbit:
In an on-stage interview with writer Ken Auletta of the New Yorker magazine, Schmidt said “Don’t be evil” is meant to provoke internal debate over what constitutes ethical corporate behavior, rather than representing an absolute moral position.
“We don’t have an ‘Evilmeter’ we can sort of apply — you know — what is good and what is evil,” Schmidt said before an audience of media industry professionals at an event sponsored by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School in San Francisco. Source: Yahoo news
There is a sense of humor here, ethical corporate practices aside, how you feel about the latest round of political hoo-ha, or just about anything else, the idea of “Don’t be Evil” has many connotations, and is interpretable by just about anyone in any case as something different. “Don’t be evil” sounds good, but it is also just a sound bite. It obviously has nothing to do with what we thought it meant when Google started using it.
As Google wins, grows, takes more market share, the stunningly wonderful thing that no one thinks of is that as Google gets bigger, its corporate size will get bigger. Eventually they will end up being the Microsoft of their day, or the IBM of their day, or the Kodak, or the GM, Ford, or other companies that seem to get to a certain size and then implode under the weight of best corporate practices, middle management political games, and the host of other things that will start degrading the ability of a company to keep on doing good things.
Google might not be there today, but eventually they will get there, and they will have to deal with some young upstart that has a better mouse trap. For some this day can not be too soon, for others, it will happen when it happens, and for the rest, they hope that the day will never come.
In the mean time plug in your “evilmeter” and “Don’t be evil”. There is a sense of irony here.
Tags: google, tag line, don’t be evil, growth, atrophy, examples, ibm, Microsoft, ford, GM, startup, money, adventure, fun
Maybe the music industries issues are not all about piracy, but also a secondary confluence that we have heard of but did not really think about. The Motley Fool though comes wading into the RIAA and its minions against everyone on the planet with an interesting take on things.
Maybe it is not piracy that is the full issue much to the consternation of RIAA et Al, but another even bigger side band, independent artists, going their own way, using alternative methods to distribute music, mainly wal-mart.
With discount department stores, live event promoters, and premium coffee houses becoming the new music brokers, is it any wonder to see the majors reeling? It gets worse. Madonna, McCartney, and The Eagles proved marketable…The ability of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Live Nation to generate adequate promotional muscle for The Eagles, McCartney, and Madonna will make it that much easier for proven acts to snip the strings in the future. Source: Motley Fool
So while the industry burns down around the old model, the new model looks promising, sell at cost or for small profit on line, sell the albums at Wal Mart, Starbucks, and other venues including Amazon where you can really cut your own deal with some software and a lawyer. Use the on line sales to promote off line sales, to promote the concert gig or touring gig. All of this without signing to a label, or feeding the RIAA and its minions machine against everyone else in the whole world.
There will always be piracy, there has always been some form of piracy, the point where the sanity begins is when you embrace chaos and work out a path that leads to less chaos. While the RIAA and its minions are busy looking elsewhere, the rest of the world has moved on, and that is the good thing. In a few years or a decade, it just won’t matter.
Tags: riaa, wal-mart, motley fool, music, minion, money, business, model
Amazon suffered intermittent outages yesterday and into today with their platform, and theories run amuck, from DDoS to their new video platform causing issues, the point here is that no one over at Amazon is really saying what the issues are, or what is really happening. When you provide the back end infrastructure and the front end infrastructure, we all want to know.
The problematic thing here is the transparency issue; if it really was a DDoS they could milk this puppy for all the PR marketing spin on the face of the planet and come out stronger. If it was the video delivery system that they launched, and then we also understand and be forgiving of that too, hey live and learn. If it was a bad upgrade that caused issue, then we could all commiserate, all of us have at some point gone through an upgrade that caused us down time.
The real issue is the cloud of darkness that seems to have descended on the entire system, no one knows for sure leading to rampant speculation of what the problem is, and what is being done (if anything) about whatever the problem is. That is the buggy issue of the day, no one outside the company knows why for sure, we all speculate, some theories are better than others, and what we do know is that Amazon is being buggy, meaning lost sales, lost consumers, and a small bit of annoyance from the 3rd party sellers.
Probably not what they want today.
Tags: amazon, outage, buggy, conspiracy theory, who knows, silence, ddos
Ad Age is running an article on selling ads on your self created YouTube videos, and given the content that I have the sales of advertising is something that I am loath to do. Not because the videos are bad, I am actively seeking a sponsor, but that because most of my videos are about information security, and just how trivial easy it is to break into things using Google or other search engines, ad sales should be restricted to companies that provide a solution in that space.
The only problem, no one offers any kind of technology against what is in the Google search engine when it comes to finding flaws in people’s web sites.
Although the advertising campaign could be interesting “Don’t do this to yourself you mind numbing…” add what ever politically correct salesy statement works there.
Or just poor programming practices like in this video.
How do you sell ads when your primary video blog is all about showing how crazy some people are when it comes to security? As in, the idea of Security is something only for other folks, not for us. What kind of advertising works here?
The other question, is given the nature of youtube fandom, what kind of advertising works best for dancing babies, or people getting hit in the crotch by a ball, bat, golf club, choose instrument of pain here. Then what about advertising for stuff that is pulled off the networks (the Viacomm lawsuit still lingers) that the person pulling the video off the air is selling advertising on someone else’s work. Mashups, media, advertising, fluid copyright, weird videos, disaster looms.
Kreativraschen has an English language blog entry on how Germany’s new data retention law is altering human behavior when it comes to using telecommunications systems, such as the phone. Germany enacted a data retention law that requires telecommunications companies to log who called who and store that information for six months so that law enforcement could use the data if they needed to.
The Forsa institute did a survey of a little over 1000 people to see how the data retention law altered their behavior if any. Their results are very interesting.
* 73% know about the data retention
* 11% said that they had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions
* 6% believe to receive less communication since the beginning of the data retention
* 52% said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention
And the sad fact: 48% still think that data retention is a necessary step for crime prevention.
What is interesting is one of the side bar comments on the entry about people not calling their therapists, which can be bad depending on how much the person under therapy is in trouble mentally or emotionally. There is also the argument that beyond crime, this information can be used to determine what journalist broke what story, and that if using the phone, journalists should not be doing so when contacting confidential or private contacts.
In all this is an interesting survey, well worth taking a look and dumping it into babel fish to get the full translation and the full impact.
Marcelo posted a note that Adam MacBeth has been building a Google map of all the software companies in Seattle. It is self service, if you own a software company, then you can pin it on the map. It makes an interesting contrast to the map of Silicon Valley that we are all so familiar with.
Seattle Software Companies . This is a map of companies in Seattle that do software work. It is not limited to companies headquartered in Seattle, but includes any company with a development office in the area. I’ve tried to keep companies off the map that are out of business or not yet viable, but please let me know if there is something that needs to be removed or edited. Source: Adam MacBeth
It is a neat map, then Adam’s blog is also interesting, in the longer run though, use the map, it is at least very interesting to see where companies are clustering.
Amazon suffered intermittent outages yesterday and into today with their platform, and theories run amuck, from DDoS to their new video platform causing issues, the point here is that no one over at Amazon is really saying what the issues are, or what is really happening. When you provide the back end infrastructure and the front end infrastructure, we all want to know. 
