quote:Originally posted by violet Blue Horse:
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So how come no one is policing xerox machines? If one had the patience and the coins they could copy a whole book and deprive some author of a book sale? The answer; the book industry isn't run by the kind of people that run the major labels.
Believe it or not, somebody is, sort of - the Copyright Clearance Center has set themselves up (for an exorbitant fee, BTW) as the intermediary between institutions and publishers mostly in the area of article copying. Librarians have a legal obligation to ensure that "the rule of five" is adhered to in their facility, as least as far as staff copying is concerned. What patrons do on their own is their look-out, which is why you may see the Title 17 warning posted by copy machines. The 'rule of five' limits copying from any journal title, not just one issue, to no more than five copies within the most recent five years, with certain exceptions: one-time classroom use of multiple copies [though most places put one copy on reserve for everybody to use], a replacement copy for missing pages of an issue you already own, a copy for personal use (as opposed to making copies for resale) and a few other I've forgotten.
Our hospital was approached by CCC to buy into their licensing program, for which they would charge us based not on the number of copies made per year but on the number of employees, which is nuts since most employees didn't make copies of anything. The license would have run somewhere around $100,000 per year, but since we routinely lent the physical copy of the journal to the doctors/nurses instead of making copies of articles, and otherwise followed all the interlibrary loan restrictions regarding copies (and had three years' worth of records to prove it) we passed on the 'offer.'
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