piracy

SFU’s “Sharing of Textbook PDFs Fact Sheet” fails to consider students’ constraints

By: Gabrielle McLaren, Editor-in-Chief I want to preface my crankiness over SFU Library’s “Sharing of Textbook PDFs Fact Sheet” by stating that I understand intellectual property laws. I understand why they’re so important to protect the work of academics and other content producers. Is it crazy for a university to discourage students from pirating textbooks? No. I’ve been lucky enough to borrow textbooks from friends who’ve taken classes previously as well. I’m also lucky to be in a discipline with few $250 textbooks. Otherwise, I buy my textbooks legally and manage to do so through a lot of price-shopping, and by…

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