No longer being able to re-sell your old stuff???
RobotWorkshop
Posts: 2,307
This seems like a case to watch. Once you buy something you should be able to resell it, donate it, etc.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/resell-own-stuff-peril-040302428.html
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/resell-own-stuff-peril-040302428.html
Comments
I know text books are expensive but what the heck was he studying at Cornell??
Guess I better get those Rembrandts out on Ebay soon!! (The canvases say "Made in USA" but I'd rather be safe than sorry!)
Don't forget, in the early days of the USA they totally ignored any copyright laws from back home in Blighty. They had to to move ahead. Looks like that might be going on in the "new world" of Asia today.
So the textbook publishers try to uplift the masses by selling affordable books to same said masses, and then the publishers get "repaid" for their efforts by those enterprising same said masses by having their markets gnawed out from under them. It's always something.
they are cheaper in other countries as the actual manufacture cost are low but R&D is recovered with a price the market can bare in each individual country.
I hope Wiley goes bankrupt. It's bad enough these publishers sell books to college students at prices that would make a drug dealer blush with envy, now they want to destroy the ability of people to resell their overpriced and badly written books.
Maybe if they sold the books at a reasonable price they wouldn't be in this mess. But you can't lecture a pig.
It's a textbook company. It'll go bankrupt.
I teach at college. I use only one textbook, and I was told this semester that my thin little book now costs students $200. That's not sustainable. I got rid of my other texts because I don't like abusing my students, and making them pay that much makes me a slave to the text. The day we stop using these ridiculously overpriced texts cannot come soon enough.
Internet, ebooks, epublishing, PDF's, etc., etc.
Considering the number of teachers and professors in colleges and universities why can't you get together and produce the required e-books and sell the course material for a nominal price? A laptop is a lot less expensive than all the books required for almost any college or university program, and is an additional requirement to the books in any case so this would be a big saving.
Because many of them also write these same books. When I took some classes at NCSU, there was some "books" that were required and cost about $35 each. They were really nothing more than 50 pages of mimeographed course notes and stuff the professor that wrote them thought should be in there. Someone needs to buy the text books which probably cost a lot to develop. Put them across a fairly limited audience and they will cost a bunch of money. We have seen a trend here to text book rental rather than the buy/sell that existed last time I took anything. Also, PDF versions are starting to show up more, but not at enough of a discount to make me want to go paperless. Just think what this will do to all the resellers near each campus and the ones selling through amazon. Wipeout!! All because someone was smart enough to buy overseas and sell here. Perhaps the book publisher should have made the price here low enough that the imports would not save much after the cost of getting them here. That is their fault as there is no law preventing this from happening. The publishers rep overseas did what they are contracted to do. The buyer became the first owner and could dispose of the property as he wished (well planned) and someone here got a break and someone else got ticked. Should have been tossed as a waste of time and a lesson to the publisher on pricing...... Just my opinion on this.....
Of course, they had this all set up for Windows and said I could not reformat the hard disk for Linux and had to keep all their legal nonsense on the disk.
weird, and very annoying.
Wiley, which used to be a very good publisher of technical books has evolved into one the world's leading academic PAY WALLs. You AND your university library can't get any good recently published research without going through one of these pay walls.
So it seems that as a student, he found a way to take advantage of Wiley charging more for what it sells in the USA. I have seen other publishers doing the reverse and charging more in Taiwan for the same text in the USA.
Was he just a student, or an importer than infringed on the publisher's distribution structure?
The bottom line here is that education is getting way too expensive, good information is getting harder and harder to get without very deep pockets, and you should just go to law school and skip any other career.
Is that for real? I'd be returning the drive as unfit for it's intended purpose.
One idea: Sell item X for a high price in location A and a low price in location B. Now, the customers will have ideas of their own (as they should), and ignore the vendor's Get Rich Quick business scheme and go buy in location B instead of A. (Isn't that what pharmacies do with the American market btw? Selling medicines in the US at twice the price of what they charge in Canada, or something like that? And obviously they try to make it illegal for Americans to just buy their medicines in Canada? I seem to remember a 60 minutes episode about this).
Unfortunately sometimes the legal system, after lobbying, will accept to protect some business idea, and that just never makes sense. Making parallel imports illegal, for example, as was done for CDs in Norway. Specialist record shops always used to import LPs directly from England, then when CDs came along the import companies grabbed the chance to increase the prices with hundreds of percents. Naturally the shops simply ignored them and imported CDs from England directly. The import companies then managed to get the government to make direct imports illegal, thus giving the import companies a monopoly. What happened then was of course that people would find ways to do private imports from England, which couldn't be stopped. So, long before the Internet began to make an impact into the sale of CDs the local shops lost business and many went out of business, and the import companies lost even more business, and they basically destroyed their own market with that law they forced through, even before the Internet became widespread.
Some people get very strange ideas sometimes. There was an interview with some marketing person once, he claimed that you do not have the right to walk into the kitchen during TV commercials. These are the same people claiming that you're not allowed to fast-forward through commercials on your TV HDR. The latter is just a sneaky way of claiming the former. In that sense I'm glad this marketroid guy came up with that nonsense in that interview, because it exposed how they're really thinking and what their ultimate goal is. Let's just hope that there are enough lawmakers around with some sense.
-Tor
I doubt its gonna hold up in court...I AM willing to try! .
I got a Idea to settle this Lets give a HDD to google and have them re format the HDD... then the WAR begins
* does a evil laugh *
Ill bet the EFF would LOVE to get there hands on that EULA .......
Point 1) There are huge archives of film, video, music etc that are stashed away in vaults that are not available for purchase. Who ever owns them has deemed it not profitable to keep them on the market. So if you have that desparate urge to here an old song or watch an old TV show, or whatever, you cannot even pay money for it if you want to. BUT if you happen to find a copy of it somewhere then you are a "pirate".
Point 2) Sometimes this stuff is not in a vault anywhere anymore. For example the BBC had a habbit to reuse video tape for new shows so that they could save a little money. As a result a lot of things of historical interest were just casually disposed of. Again if you happen to find a recording somewhere you could technically be infringing copyright.
Point 3) I believe that "we the people" have the right to preserve the cultural artifacts that we deem valuable regardless of what some business concern thinks about it.
I didn't agree to the terms and reformatted them for linux or osx depending on which the many drives I bought.
I believe that this will soon be part of the job description. It certainly should be. It's what I plan to do, and largely do already.
Students currently pay more for books than I paid for books, tuition, and a dorm room. If you're over 45 or so, the same is true for you. I continually point out to my colleagues that we believe that college has become expensive, but have no idea how expensive. I think professors believe that students pay a little more than we do, and that's why we're mystified when they don't buy the texts for their classes. The reality is that they pay an ungodly amount, FAR more than we did, and would have to be nuts to buy all the textbooks they're required to buy. The game has changed, and colleges need to dump textbooks ASAP.
I would love my institution to announce that we no longer require any textbooks. I think whoever goes first there will have a nice little marketing line for a couple of years.
Seagate FreeAgent products continue to do this. Just buy one and look inside at the 'user friendly software' documentations. Good for Apple and Windows.
Since it did reformat nicely to EXT3 and partitioned the way I wanted it, I figured that I would tell the world and wait for the lawyers from Seagate to visit Taiwan and collect their unit.
"I have seen the enemy and it is us" said Pogo.
These days I am thinking we need to promulgate a new charter of some sort, "an ECONOMY of the people, by the people, and for the people." I just fear it seems to sound too much like Karl Marx meets the founding fathers of the USA -- very Hollywood fantasy-ish.
Besides, why would I want to download a lot of old movies and music that did nothing but brainwash me into being a couch potato?
One anthropologist's cultural artifacts were once another person's garbage dump. Right?
A desperate urge to hear an old song..... get thee to a therapist.
These days we have several cash rich corporation that are keeping their profits off=shore to avoid paying US income tax; including Apple and MS. I have no idea what the US government thinks the benefit of this is. Maybe that will change and fund a revival of the US economy.
But there is an element of fear in the fact that we may not be allowed to own many things in the future, just have to pay rents and licenses and fees.
It is almost as if the USA was a community that built a great castle and citadel only to find that the leaders now wanted to be kings and had both the loyal guards and the infrastructure provided by people who believe that would never happen.