This is part of Ohio Senate Bill 151Sec. 3346.05. No professor, faculty member, instructor, or other employee of a state institution of higher education shall profit in any way from the sale of textbooks and other learning materials used in a class taught by that person, including royalties from authorship.
Now many of you may not know about this bill or even care. The intent is to control the price of textbooks at state institutions. The problem with this portion of the bill is that it takes away the free market of writing books. Nobody tells JK Rowlings how much money she is allowed to make on Harry Potter. So why would it be allowable to tell a professor how much they can profit on their own writings. It takes a lot of work to write a textbook and not allowing a professor to use their own book in the classroom is not right. Yes the books are very expensive but the knowledge contained in them is not a right for students to have. They must pay for it just as if you were buying anything else
