DU teachers unite to fight copyright breach slur

Authors and teachers came together on Wednesday to show their solidarity against the recent move of the consortium of international publishing houses — Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and

Taylor & Francis, slapping a case against Delhi School of Economics (DSE) photocopy shop citing copyright infringement.

The publishing houses have also claimed Rs 60 lakh as damages. 

“I was the happiest person when my book was put up on the web, giving it open access to all. Knowledge cannot be contained, it has to keep moving,” said

Satish Deshpande, head of the Sociology department.

 “We don’t even get huge royalties by writing these books. We put in a lot of efforts and years in for the people to read them,” added

Deshpande.

Several academic authors signed photocopies of their printed books and donated them to school’s library.

Author and former faculty member of DSE Amartya Sen, who could not come, said, “I am distressed to learn about the attitude of the Oxford

University Press (OUP) on the use of photocopied course packs for the benefit of students.”

“I am personally distressed as an OUP author to learn about this policy decision. I hope something can be done to make the academic arrangements for the education of students less difficult and more sensible,” he said.

Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Nivedita Menon said the fact that the teaching community is able to write is because it is a public-funded institution and the funds come from taxes. “We write to be read. Students pay us, publishers do not pay us,” said Menon.

According to Menon, India has one of the best copyright laws. “Ninety-nine per cent of academic authors even after publishing their books with these publishing houses will call this action illegal,” she added.  As per

Section 52(1) (h) of the Indian Copyright Act, “(h) the reproduction of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work- (i) by a teacher or a pupil in the course of instruction; or (ii) as part of the questions to be answered in an examination; or (iii) in answers to such questions” is permissible and constitutes an exception to the Act. 

There is no quantitative restriction on the amount of material that can be photocopied.

Historian Uma Chakravarty said, “All my works are mine and my labour. The more it is read the more fulfilled I am as a scholar. Copyright go to hell.”

Author Arundhati Roy also sent photostated copy of her recent book

‘Broken Republic’ lending support to the campaign.

Bonojit Hussain, student leading the campaign, is of the view that the issue is not about disallowing a photocopy shop to make copies of the reading material but to make people aware that photocopying reading material is not illegal.

“All the photocopy shops in DU have suddenly started self-policing by putting up posters that they will not make copies of complete books as it is illegal which is not the case,” he said. He also added that similar incident took place in Pune Univeristy recently. Student alumni of Oxford Univeristy has also sent a petition to OUP regarding such an act,” he said.

Source: http://www.deccanherald.com/content/284567/du-teachers-unite-fight-copyright.html

Absent libraries, photocopied minds

What the case of the photocopying shop versus the academic presses demonstrates is the failure of the Indian library system and a parallel lack of intellectual growth

Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi Sep 25, 2012, 00:26 IST

Once the ragging was over, freshers at Delhi University (DU) often went through a more pleasant initiation rite — the handing over of stacks of photocopied notes and chapters from books, a legacy passed down from seniors to their juniors.

Those stacks were substantial enough to qualify as quasi-books in their own right. Some of these faux anthologies had the impressive patina of age and signs of a fledgling democracy of colleges in DU: notes that had been passed down from Kirori Mal through St Stephens via South Campus colleges from generation to generation.

So when two academic presses, Oxford University Press (OUP) and Cambridge University Press (CUP), sued the small photocopying shop that operates near the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Delhi for infringement of copyright, they appeared to have threatened a venerable tradition. Students protested, threatened a boycott of the two presses, defending photocopying as their right; and an argument began over the rights and iniquities of copyright.

Both sides have merit. The academic presses are correct to demand an end to this widespread and common practice of copyright violation — they have a duty, however unpopular this may be, to the authors and the books that they publish. But the students have a point when they say academic books are often priced out of their budget, or that it’s unreasonable to expect students to buy 20 books where only a chapter or so might be cited in each.

Copyright is not the issue, though it might be the legal battleground to this case. (If OUP and CUP win their case, the photocopying shops will close shutters in DU, and open doors elsewhere. The practice is likelier to go underground than to stop.) What the case of the photocopying shop versus the academic presses demonstrates is the failure of the Indian library system and a parallel lack of intellectual growth.

The problem that university students face in Delhi (and the rest of India) is not unique: especially for less affluent students, the cost of academic journals and books is prohibitive, and buying what would be required to cover the year’s syllabus is impractical.

For many of the world’s students, from universities in America and Oxford to places with very different college cultures – Portugal, Mexico, Belarus, Singapore – the library is their parallel university. In terms of scale, and just as important, the range of books on offer and the accessibility of the reading rooms to students, the public library or college library elsewhere has been as essential a part of the university experience as the actual classes and lectures.

The average Indian student cannot imagine what using a library elsewhere might be like: the Belarus library with its 8 million items and public concerts, the massive University of Coimbra library in Portugal with its 16th century charter – livraria pública para lentes, estudantes e quaisquer pessoas outras, the public library for lecturers, students and also everyone else – quite apart from the giant public libraries that also have space for art, sculptures, performances among the books. Even the best of DU’s libraries (or any Indian national or university library) cannot compare to any of the world’s good public libraries — it’s like comparing bullock carts and auto-rickshaws, which get the job done, to subway systems, which get the same job done on a completely different scale.

The Career Librarian blog describes what it took to build the Mexican library system — currently “the largest public library system in Latin America”. It required the enthusiastic backing of the state and the government over a decade, massive grants from foundations like the Gates Foundation. Most of all, a country that has had more than its share of problems with corruption and drug wars recognised that providing access to learning, computers and books for all their citizens is an urgent priority, not a luxury.

In the absence of a library culture – a place not just to read but to explore, not just to fetishise books but to own and examine the ideas inside them – the world of the Indian student is a shockingly narrow one. The real argument against photocopying texts isn’t, perhaps, the copyright one, which is only a legal argument.

When we read as students from those photocopied “books”, we read without an understanding of how much context and history had been lost. Often, chapters from academic studies and works floated in isolation, no link connecting one photocopied chapter and the next. No one referred to the uber-texts, the actual journals or books in which they had appeared. The “books” were focused around the core of the syllabus and their purpose was only to get students through the exams.

Arguments, essays and schools of thoughts were stapled together in those books, often without any reference to the larger world where those ideas had gestated and been born. If you were lucky enough to have good professors, a better map of thinkers might have been available; if not, there are only these ersatz books and their limited world-view, shaping the way the next generation of students will negotiate their lives.

Source: http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/nilanjana-s-roy-absent-libraries-photocopied-minds/487452/

The Student, Libraries and Machines

Recent debates over photocopying expose the many complications that underlie the practice

What did we do when there were no photo-copiers? From my under graduate days over two decades ago, I seem to remember an economy of paucity where books, class-notes and the low cunning needed to pass examinations served as the principal currencies of knowledge. Other than a few cheap editions and reprints, most books were expensive and difficult to come by outside libraries. So we took ourselves to the reading rooms and tried to switch off the world outside for at least a couple of hours.

This is still not a bad model for the humanities, where often all that you need to do is to place a reasonably intelligent young person and a large number of books in mutual proximity . But Indian libraries are not welcoming or comfortable places, nor do they stay open beyond office hours. The mandarins responsible for higher education do not seem to realize the need of properly equipped and staffed libraries, and waste their time on footling irrelevancies. However, it is also true that we could make do with fewer books in our time, for there was a one-sizefit-all curriculum which was rarely revised. In addition, the leisurely gait of an annual system meant that there was no mad rush for study materials.

Then in the 1990s, things began to slowly change, with `option al' and `special' papers beginning to daringly raise their heads -for the first time, the research interests of the teachers started to be reflected in the curricula.

In 2003, Jadavpur University became one of the first institutes of higher learning to switch wholly to a semester system. The resultant culture shock played out differently -some departments resented it, and did a cutpaste job with their old syllabus, with disastrous consequences. Others, such as ours, dismantled the older system completely and ex tended the scope of op tional courses to cover nearly half the sylla bus. Evaluation meth ods were also chang ed, with reduced weight given to termi nal examinations, and more stress given to continuous evaluati on.

Given the wide range of new texts that were brought into the changed syllabi, ext began to become re the idea of the `set' text began to become redundant. Library acquisitions could not keep pace with the needs of both students and teachers. In a semester at JU, four courses are taught and each of the courses may have anything between half-a-dozen to a dozen texts. In a course titled `Crime Fiction' I once taught, there were nearly 30 detective novels. Which student could be expected to buy all the texts?

And which library would stock them? We had perforce to depend on borrowing, photocopying and in some cases, e-texts or pdf versions of the books. It was that or not running the course at all.

I do realize that the scenario is different with affiliating universities which do not have the luxury of rotating their syllabi or offering optionals. But at the same time, there is a need to move away from the stultifying system of teaching the same syllabus year after year and sending students scurrying to photocopy the same old stuff. Sometimes, the act of photocopying itself becomes a surrogate for study, with proportionately less time devoted to the actual task of reading the copies.

Having said which, the fuss made by the three publishers about photocopying at Delhi University has a faintly comic ring about it. The fact that they did nothing all these years indicates that it was not worth their while then to prosecute, but now the peanuts DU has to shell out as licensing fee suddenly seem to matter. Add to it that one of the trio -which specializes in publishing academic journals -is notorious for charging the most unconscionable prices to libraries worldwide and not paying a paisa to its contributors.

ABHIJIT GUPTA The author is Associate Professor of English, Jadavpur University
Read More News at: http://epaper.telegraphindia.com/PUBLICATIONS/TT/TT/2012/09/04/index.shtml

DU students photocopying academic books is legal by Danish Raza

You just cannot produce scholars with a ban on photocopying course material. Literally!” said a miffed Lokesh, an M. Phil student at the Delhi School of Economics, popularly known as D- School, at Delhi University’s North campus. Lokesh is part of a campaign to save the D- School photocopy shop from a petition filed against it by several large publishers.

For students at the varsity, xeroxing course material from the prescribed syllabus is perfectly normal, and the spiral bound black and white pages of different sizes- each bunch weighing anywhere between 2 to 3kg have been an integral part of campus culture for generations now.

Almost every piece of required reading in every syllabus is available with the photocopy shop at a cost. Of course, nobody thought about the legality of it all. Until recently that is!

The copyright infringement petition filed by Oxford and Cambridge university press with Fancis and Tailor against DU and Rameshwari photocopy services in D-School, challenging the practice of photocopying course material, has left varsity students red faced. The petition says that photocopying allows students cheap access to otherwise expensive material.

Photocopying portions of texts for academic purposes is not illegal: Reuters

“The crackdown on photocopy is illegal. The current pricing of academic journals makes it inaccessible to substantial number of students,” said Lawrence Liang of Alternate Law Forum, a Bangalore based law firm that particularly looks at copyright issues.

About the legality of photocopying course packs, Liang said under the Indian Copyright Act, students are entitled to photocopy academic work for study and research purpose.

“Section 52 (1) says that one can reproduce any work by a teacher or a pupil in the course of instruction or as a part of questions or answers to questions. The same section allows a fair dealing with any work other than computer programs when done for private or personal use, including research,” he said.

The petition has brought under the lens, the set norms and definition of ‘mass circulation’. To make a case for violation of copyright act, publishers have challenged a decades old practice in a university, rather than targeting the sale of pirated copies of their books in grey market.

Nor is this the first time publishers have attacked a photocopy service provider to launch a discourse on copyright law. Danish Sheikh, a lawyer at the Alternative Law Forum cites examples from other countries in an article published on Kafila. According to Shiekh’s article, in 1991, eight publishers filed a lawsuit against Kinko’s Graphic Corp in USA on similar grounds. Kinko’s lost the case but it lead to the formation of a system of intermediary agencies which take care of copyright licensing of academic work.

The report also cites an instance where instructors at Georgia State University got in trouble when they posted readings online. Publishers argued that doing so was the equivalent of paper photocopying and pressed for regulations. The case resulted in the court putting a quantitative cap on the portion of a book that can be posted online.

“It is a classic strategy followed by publishers in the West so that all academic institutions get the signal and toe the line,” said Ravi Sundaram, senior fellow at Delhi based Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies.

Students said that in the current academic scenario, one cannot do away with photocopies unless there is an equally viable alternative in place.

“The photocopied compilation is essential for thousands of students from economically weaker sections who cannot afford to buy the original books. Sometimes a prescribed reading is only a chapter of a book. Does the publisher expect each student to buy the whole book to read that particular chapter?” said Lokesh.

“Since college libraries do not have sufficient copies of the designated readings, photocopying is the only viable option,” she added. As part of the campaign, students have launched a Facebook page in support of the photocopy shop, and will conduct a seminar on copyright laws in India.

Part of the problem lies with the fact that after releasing exorbitantly priced hard bound editions, a majority of publishers don’t release affordable versions of their books. On average, an Oxford book on any science topic costs Rs 700 to 800. A photocopied variant of the book costs around Rs 200.

“A course pack is not equivalent to compiling a new book or selling a pirated version. Most of these readings are authorised and prescribed readings of the universities meant for private circulation and academic purposes, and not mass produced or produced for mass commercial purposes. Departments and libraries are all an active part of this enterprise and so all of us must be sued for this, not just Rameshwari photocopy service,” said Subhadeepta Roy, PhD student in D- School.

More News at: http://www.firstpost.com/india/du-students-photocopying-academic-books-is-legal-437852.html