Copyright lessons

It's the textbook publishers who need to be proactive

The Delhi High Court's notable judgment last week lifting a four-year ban on a photocopier kiosk on the Delhi University campus from providing students with "course packs" containing material from books published by three international publishers is unlikely to end the debate around copyright laws and their application. The votaries of a better alignment between Indian and global intellectual property rights (IPRs) will deplore the ruling, which struck down a petition filed by the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses and Taylor & Francis in 2012. There is no doubt that, taken together with India's lax enforcement of anti-piracy measures and the Supreme Court's rejection of a patent extension to Novartis in April 2013, the country's reputation as an IPR enforcer is unlikely to be enhanced.

The publishers, however, had based their case on a narrow interpretation of the Copyright Act, saying that the reproduction of work could be allowed in classroom instruction or in an exam paper. Photocopying, admittedly, lies outside this spatial ambit and there is something to be said against the fact that the activity had the implicit sanction of university authorities. But this view needs to be set against the spirit of the law that Justice Sahai Endlaw's ruling has raised. By focusing on the primacy of addressing the "reasonable educational needs" of students, he argued that course packs could not be treated as an infringement of copyright law. The fact that 33 authors, including Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, whose works were copied in the course packs and were mentioned in the lawsuit, signed a letter dissociating themselves from the lawsuit when it was filed suggests that the creators of the intellectual property themselves are partial to the students' point of view.

The prohibitive costs of textbooks and the difficulty of studying them in noisy Indian university libraries make it reasonable to conclude that a judgment in the publishers' favour would not have stopped this practice but simply driven it underground. In fact, in filing this suit, the publishers have displayed a degree of myopia in their business strategies. The question of photocopied course packs is not limited to India; in the US, websites ahead of university semesters bristle with advisories about where second-hand textbooks and photocopied course packs can be cheaply sourced.

Clearly, publishers are missing a market demand. They are also behind the times. For the past 30 years, photocopying has been merely a technological upgrade on the painstaking hand-copied reproductions that students once circulated. Today, students can just as easily photograph and share the relevant pages of a book on camera phones - as many confessed to doing - and creating samizdat course packs that will be hard to track. In these days of online publishing, textbooks publishers may find their copyright anxieties better addressed if they worked proactively with universities to, say, provide course pack material - which mostly comprises some pages from different books rather than a whole book - online, at a nominal price slightly above or below a photocopied equivalent. They should know, after all, that a physical textbook is just one way of disseminating knowledge.