Course packs and copyright protection

A copy-shop owner is being sued for copying readings without permission. Before getting lost in copyright terminology, picture the transaction: a professor assigns selections from several books and journals, and the shop combines those selections into a course pack. Students can buy the assigned readings without purchasing every complete book.

I can see why students would like that. Why buy an expensive book if the class only uses a small part of it? But a useful service isn't automatically a legal one. The owner's first defense is that getting permission is slow, difficult, and expensive. That explains why he would prefer to skip the process; it doesn't establish that he may. Filing taxes can be a headache, too. The inconvenience alone wouldn't settle whether someone must do it.

Then we get a more promising defense: copying for teaching purposes is typically protected. Does that cover him? The complication is that a business made these copies for profit. Keep that question open. We haven't received the court's answer yet, and educational use and commercial profit might coexist.

The second paragraph tells us what matters legally: the purpose of the copying, the kind of work, how much was copied and how important that portion was, and the effect on the work's market value. We don't need to memorize the list. We need to recognize its job: these are the factors the court will use to evaluate the case.

The publishers focus on market harm. If this shop doesn't have to pay permission fees, other shops might stop paying, too, reducing the value of the publishers' works. That's their argument. The court finds that it doesn't establish enough harm to the market or value of the works. Notice the difference between failing to demonstrate sufficient harm and proving that copying could never hurt sales. The ruling here is the former.

And the court doesn't treat profit as an automatic disqualifier. The copies serve an educational purpose even though the shop charges for making them. The price also depends on pages, not content. Think of paying the same copying rate for an assigned reading as for your own essay. The shop isn't charging extra because one set of pages contains someone else's valuable writing.

That leads to the final distinction: what is the shop making money from? In the court's view, it's the ability to make copies efficiently. Professors and students may make these copies themselves, and using a business to get the same copies more cheaply doesn't change that permission. The shop supplies a service the academic users cannot perform as efficiently.

So we've followed an accusation, the competing arguments, and the ruling. The owner wins because, under the court's reasoning in this case, educational copying through a paid copying service is protected. We should keep that reasoning attached to this case rather than turn it into permission to copy any educational material for any purpose.