In my very first assignment for my Business Law class, I was asked to provide citations for answers to homework assignments. A very standard requirement for any college course, cite your sources. To my surprise, when I open up my McGraw Hill Text Book, highlight the text I need, and press ctrl+c on the keyboard to copy text, it doesn't work. Everywhere else on the internet this works, in other eBook platforms this works, it's only McGraw Hill's platform that actively blocks this.

I'm a software engineer by trade. I know that the feature to copy text is built-in, that means if you do absolutely nothing, your users will be able to copy text from your web page. McGraw Hill has actively invested resources to BLOCK copying text from their eBooks, which is such an important feature for students.

"McGraw Hill Connect is a course management and adaptive learning solution that enables millions of learners to achieve their full potential," is McGraw Hill's own description of their Connect platform.

In Connect, students can access course textbooks in the form of eBooks on the web platform. When students are doing their homework, a common requirement is to cite specific texts in the course textbook where their information comes from. McGraw Hill does NOT allow students to copy text from their eBooks for their homework. They have stated: "McGraw-Hill eBooks cannot be copied and pasted due to copyright issues."

In my research I have found that OReilly Media, a similar online platform that leases textbooks to their customers allows copying text from their online platform. Amazon Kindle books also allow copying text within the kindle app from their eBooks.

The ability to copy text is built into the web browser you are using to read this petition. The ability to copy text does not require any extra effort to enable. McGraw Hill has invested resources in actively disabling this built-in browser feature. This makes it more difficult for students to cite sources from their textbooks.

We demand that McGraw Hill disables this restriction and allows students who have paid for access to the platform to be able to copy and cite text from these text books.