this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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You see, if you pirate a couple textbooks in college because you don't have resources, but you want to earn your right to participate in society and not starve, it's called theft.
But if one of the top 10 companies in the world does the same with thousands of books just to get even richer, it's called fair use.
Simple, really.
I went to grad school in the USA. I bought the international version of a few books that were going to be used in class (knew beforehand that the recommended lectures weren't written by any faculty member at such a university), but that didn't stop the professor from going aggressive and saying that my books were banned from the classroom because they aren't the USA version. When I told the professor what the difference was between me buying a text book for $15 instead of $200 and a Fortune 500 outsourcing entire departments instead of hiring USA employees?
Interestingly, my books weren't an issue. Yes, I gambled being publicly labeled as a troublemaker in my engineering department (probably I was labeled privately within faculty members).
I hope somebody pokes that professor's nipples