Fundamental right to copy, but for a fee

NEW DELHI: Every time a student walks in to a photocopying booth to get a book copied cover to cover, the law is being violated.
Authors and publishers are losing out. But what happens when books are unavailable or expensive? There is a way out: the right to photocopy portions of a book for a fee.
The government has under the copyright law taken the step of setting up an Indian Reprographics Rights Organisation. Unfortunately, major publishers, those most affected by photocopying, are not a part of the organisation.
If the situation is not rectified, those who stand to lose are students, as photocopying of books is a cognizable offence and publishers whose rights are not protected by the IRRO will continue to conduct raids.
The student community in due course will be deprived as access to books will get tougher and more expensive.
The worst affected by the photocopying route to piracy are publishing houses like Elsevier Science, Pearson Education, Lippincort Raven, blackwell Science, Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Springer-Verlag, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
As per international norms, photocopying or to use the industry jargon reprography, is permissible in limited quantities, that is a certain percentage of the book can be photocopied but a licence fee must be paid to the copyright holder, that is the author or publisher.
However, it is physically inconceivable for the student or an institution to go about finding the copyright holder.
To make matters simpler, the practice world over is to set up a collective licensing agency. So the institutions can pay a fee as stipulated by the agency, which in turn passes it on to the publisher/author.
India which boasts a publishing industry with an annual turnover of around Rs 7,000 crore, did not have any such licensing agency. Though a need has been felt given the losses that publishing houses have to incur due to the problem of illegal photocopying. The Indian Copyright Act, allows for the creation of such an agency.
To fill this breach, certain individuals like the president emeritus of one of the domestic association,Federation of Indian publishers (FIP) and president of Authors Guild of India (AGI) have formed a collective copyright licensing agency — IRRO.
The IRRO claims that FIP members have given their mandate to it. However, in reality publishing houses like Tata MCGraw Hill, Macmillan India, Bharti Bhavan, who are members of the FIP, chose to come together with publishers like Elsevier Science, Pearson Education, John Wiley Sons, Springer-Verlag to form a licensing agency, the Copyright Clearing Agency of India, CCAI.
Despite the obvious problems, the government recognised the IRRO as the organisation to give licences.