HDCP break and DMCA

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 01:23:42PM -0800, Tim May (tcmay at got.net) wrote:
> On Sunday, November 25, 2001, at 01:09 PM, Eric Cordian wrote:

> > Why don't people copy paperback books?  Because it is cheaper to buy
> > them.

> > Not because the paperback book copyright police threaten you with
> > life in prison.

> Why don't people copy hardback books?
>
> Answer: they do! Go to any large copying center near a university and
> look for "professor packs" or "HistCon 101 Course Materials"
> consisting of copied material out of various textbooks, hard and soft.
> The deal is that the student takes the professor pack over to a copy
> machine and runs off a copy of each of the, for example, 400 pages.
> The student pays $20 or so and saves himself having to buy 10 books to
> read one or two chapters or sections out of each. The students are
> happy, the copy shop is happy, the professor is happy, and only the
> publishers and authors are unhappy.

First:  this is somewhat orthogonal:

  - Only a portion of the book is being copied.  This makes the
    reproduction cost significantly different from the sale cost of the
    authorized book.

  - Materials from many sources are being assimilated, raising total
    costs; and the holding period for the materials is generally short
    (the duration of a quarter or semester).  Production-quality
    bindings and archive-quality paper aren't required.



Second:  where exactly is this occuring?  You seem to indicate smaller
shops.

I worked at Kinko's during the period 1989 - 1992, largely serving UC
Davis.  This was during the period Kinko's was involved in a large
copyright infringement suit (Basic Books v. Kinko's, ultimately lost by
Kinko's to the tune of US$1.3m) over the issue of "Professor
Publishing", the coursepack preparation service.  As Tim indicated, this
was a core of Kinko's business model from the company's founding in
Santa Barbara in the early 1970s.

Kinko's, at least, of major copy centers, has significantly revised its
processes, both securing copyright clearance on more (most?) of the
materials, and deemphasizing the role of Professor Publishing within
Kinko's.

At the time I left the company, there was a strong awareness for all
employees about making unauthorized copies (and you'll occasionally hear
stories about people who're denied service to copy materials they own),
at least when this is done "behind the counter".  What customers did in
the self-serve area was largely unregulated.

> This was very common here in Santa Cruz, as recently as several years
> ago when I was doing a lot of copying of my own papers.

Care to name any of the shops at which this was occuring?  Kinko's,
AlphaGraphics (are they still around?), and other high-profile repro
shops tend to have fairly strong policies regarding unauthorized
copying.  The same tends to extend to copy centers run by colleges and
universities.  Smaller, privately held shops tend to play faster and
looser.

> There were signs up about not violating copyright law, but these
> professor packs were in clear violation.
>
> (Yeah, someone may say "Maybe the professors made an arrangement with
> the publishers and authors." I give this a vanishingly small chance of
> being the case in more than 2% of all such "course materials" packs.)

In the case of Kinko's, the covered materials were most if not all in my
experience, with a sheet listing clearances added to packs by the time
I'd left.  There's also the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC:
http://www.copyright.com/), formed in the 1970s, which has played a
significant role in recent photocopy copyright infringement claims as,
as its existence has "removed any excuse for unauthorized copying"
(Paul Goldstein, _Copyright's Highway_, Hill & Wang, 1994).

Peace.  Tim May excepted.

--
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>       http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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