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The irony of this proposal is that many professors, realizing that book prices are just obscene in the academic market, are preparing their own materials and giving them to the students for the cost of printing them.

Up here in Canada, there are strict regulations on such photocopying. Professors order a course pack from a copy shop made up of hand-picked chapters from various books, which the students can then pick up, but because of the per-page photocopying license fees, these often end up costing the student about as much as the original textbook.

- RG>

If my site is designed such that something happens and you modify it such that something else happens, we may have an issue. Clearly, copyright affects creative work but we have seen that 'creative' can be quite broadly defined.

Circumstances alter cases and the idea is not nearly as risible as you purport it to be. Consider the following page: http://www.accesscopyright.ca/Default.aspx?id=125 They clearly think they can forbid you from modifying their content. If, by modifying a header file, you cause their content to be modified then they may have an actionable tort.

What about Access Copyright? Are there fees charged to places like libraries with a photocopier, an OK for people to photocopy books?

Teachers or educators, however you'll have it, face the issue of copyrights, royalties, and public performance caveats all the time.

Access Copyright ("The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency") who is responsible for Captain Copyright has a complaint form http://www.accesscopyright.ca/compliance.asp?a=32/ to "report a possible infringement of copyright involving digital rights".

da_guy2: In fact under canadian law photocopying for personal us IS legal and is making up a large defence of file sharing in Canada.

I'm not sure what defence you're referring to, as the national policies for photocopying are well established, and no supporter of legal file-sharing would advocate theft, only fair dealing. Perhaps you are thinking of across-the-board media levy hikes that were overturned? This is why blank "Audio CDs" cost more than "data" CD-R's, and why I got a $15 refund for my iPod Mini.

Regardless of the intended use, you may photocopy up to 10% of most copyrighted works (with some defined flexibility), providing the library or organization pays licence fees to http://www.accesscopyright.ca/. You are not "allowed" to take a book home and whip off a "backup" on your Laser MFP for "personal use" based on your good word and angelic smile. This is why bookstores don't have photocopiers, even though the store would gain LOTS of extra revenue, the authors would not; the intentions conflict. Aside from buying the book, a library also pays fees that get passed along to authors to help offset free circulation.

In reality, the U.S.A. often has more well-defined, and in some cases more lenient, laws for copying and fair use/dealing, especially where educational use is concerned. Canadian teachers can't legally show bought/rented movies in classrooms, for example. I believe Wal-mart Canada briefly ran a commercial made for Wal-mart U.S. where a school teacher was shopping to do exactly that. They didn't know their Canadian laws either.

We often complain about the **AA clamping down on media and entertainment, but books still contain the real knowledge, and thanks largely to Google, publishers are starting to suck up to an OPT-OUT policy of copyright violating, proving it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Astounding.

Check out the story over at Access Copyright, a clearinghouse agency for writers and visual artists in Canada that compensates these creators in cases where "their work is copied, whether it's being photocopied, scanned or downloaded." This is done through licensing fees which, in turn, is often collected through levying on photocopying (such as an extra fee slipped into the charges on a university's photocopy machine).

It's not the individual users who log in and pay up each time they photocopy from a library book (though they could). It's the providers that have to do the work. I think, unfortunately, that this precedent will be important when trying to put responsibility on the ISPs.