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Stung by the alarming rise of photocopying shops that copy entire books, spiral bind and sell them on specific orders from students, some leading publishers in Delhi have cajoled the police to take action against them for violating copyright law which is now recognized as a cognizable offence. Quite apart from the fact that photocopying is impossible to police, three basic questions regarding copyright and its implementation arise in the age of internet and information highways.
First, is photocopying entire books on a book-to-book basis a violation of copyright?
Second, is photocopying key sections of a book, which is the general practice, also a violation of copyright?
Third, how rampant is the photocopying business? Also, does it seriously hamper the sales of the original book which is why some publishers have been compelled to take police action?
With the rapid advances in printing and communications technology, copyright law is a sprawling, shifting mass that defies rational analysis. The chief culprit is the new technology which has made it easier to duplicate material without acknowledgment or payment. In many cases it is as perfect as the original and with some fine tuning even better than it. There is nothing that the original copyright holders can do about it and the vast majority have learned to live with it.
What has hurt the publishers however is commercial exploitation. Copying that is now done in practically every library is not a violation; its sales for profit is. Photocopying shops which have set up a regular business copying books that students can’t afford do violate the law in a strict sense of the term. But this begs the question: does copying selected chapters and not the entire book from cover to cover also amount to violating copyright? It is difficult to say. Purists would say it does. However, many would disagree because the copied chapters are not in “continuous prose” but in bits and pieces that would be difficult to comprehend by the common reader who is unfamiliar with the subject.
More importantly, photocopiers are not publishers or booksellers who mass-produce or stock textbooks; they work on copy orders on a book-to-book basis against specific orders. In that sense they can’t be described as pirates who print multiple copies of a book (mostly school textbooks or popular down-market novels) and sell them clandestinely in a fly-by-night operation. Theirs is an open operation which is open to all, usually students.
Photocopying is now a cottage industry that has been made possible because of the high prices of university level textbooks. There are no indications that prices of essential texts will come down, and as long as they remain high, photocopied books that are half the price of the printed editions will remain in demand. There is no way to curb them now. |
