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Back in September last year, Mike wrote about the remarkable court ruling in India that copyright is not inevitable, divine or a natural right. As we have been reporting since 2013, the case in question was brought by three big Western publishers against Delhi University and a photocopy shop over "course packs" -- bound collections of photocopied extracts from books and journals that are sold more cheaply than the sources. Although the High Court of Delhi ruled that photocopying textbooks in this way is fair use, that was not necessarily the end of the story: the publishers might have appealed to India's Supreme Court. But as the Spicy IP site reports, they didn't:
In a stunning development, OUP, CUP and Taylor & Francis just withdrew their copyright law suit filed against Delhi University (and its photocopier, Rameshwari) 5 years ago! They indicated this to the Delhi high court in a short and succinct filing made this morning.
This withdrawal brings to an end one of the most hotly contested IP battles ever, pitting as it did multinational publishers against academics and students. The law suit was filed as far back as 2012 and it dragged on for 5 long years!
[...] That's an important point. So often it seems that copyright only ever gets longer and stronger, with the public always on the losing side. The latest news from India shows that very occasionally, it's the public that wins.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 14 2017, @12:21PM
Thanks to the miracle of mass production, the cost of producing a book is lower than the cost of manually photocopying a book. It merely means they're a manufacturing company competing on manufacturing cost, instead of a rights company extracting as much licensing fee from the IP as possible. This is probably good.
The numbers make sense.... Lets pick something nice and triggering like "A Hymn Before Battle" by John Ringo thats $7.99 in paperback retail price with 480 pages that's 1.7 cents per page not financially viable to photocopy unless someone else is paying for the copying LOL. Knowing typical markups I think the cost of actually printing a paperback book are "About a penny per page" if you're going in non-profit and no wholesalers or distributors (like if you went vanity press)
Its also worth noting that when I did stuff like this in the USA, the days of one cent or two cent copies are kinda past. Last I checked "fedex kinkos" was charging ten cents. I had one EE class by a prof I didn't like who spec'd a small book costing over $1/page in the 80s so I borrowed a fellow student's book and copied the whole thing for only about a buck instead of $125.
Kids these days just download a pirated PDF or DJVU to their ipad tablet anyway. You can talk all you want about the joy of reading off legacy paper but tell a college kid he gets $125 of beer or $125 of old fashioned textbook and they tend to decide pretty quick...