Print shops in colleges and universities hoard hundreds of pirated textbooks.
College textbooks are priced higher, and students can save half the money by buying photocopied textbooks. Copy shops have become the focus of many publishers’ rights protection.
In February, the National Office for Combating Pornography and Illegal Publications, in conjunction with five departments, issued the Notice on Launching Special Governance Actions for Universities and Their Surrounding Copy Stores in Some Key Cities, requiring 40 key cities across the country to severely crack down on piracy and copy activities in universities and their surrounding copy shops, so as to curb the growing trend of campus piracy. Beijing, where universities gather, has also been included in the list of special governance this year.
What are the reasons for the widespread popularity of copying teaching materials? Beijing Youth Daily reporter recently visited copying shops around many universities in Beijing, and found that most shops are still openly undertaking the business of "privately customized" copying teaching materials, and even some shops have hundreds of electronic textbooks in their computers, and the "class" group buying business has been raging. Because of the hidden operation of the store, the difficulty in obtaining evidence and the unclear legal boundary, the business activities of the copy shops around the university are still on the verge of supervision.
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Copy shops hoard "group purchase" electronic textbooks, and the business is booming.
On the morning of March 10th, the reporter of Beiqing Daily came to the printing shop in a comprehensive service center for college students and said, "Boss, a group of postgraduate students want to copy and print some textbooks." Without asking what the book was, the shopkeeper promised, "Just bring the book. If there is no book, it is ok to have an electronic version, a Word file or a Pdf file. 2 cents per page, 1 cent if there is more — — They are all bound for you. "
Only one of the photocopiers and printers in this shop is working. "I was very busy when I first started school, but I am already busy now." The owner said. The reporter of Beiqing Daily saw that there were three "teaching materials" printed and bound on A4 paper on the windowsill, namely "Latest English Course for Science and Technology", "Information Systems Essentials" and "Liu Wei IELTS Speaking". The second book is in English, and the inside page shows that it was edited and published by an American university; The third book is actually a handout from an English training institution in China. The owner told the reporter that these three books were printed by students before, "I made an extra copy and put it here for whom."
The reporter of Beiqing Daily visited the copy shops around many universities in Haidian, which are mostly distributed near the canteens and teaching buildings in the student living quarters. On average, there are at least six or seven print shops in a school. Most of the small shops are only three or four square meters. When it comes to recess and rest, the small shops are packed with students coming and going, and there are many students who come to copy the teaching materials. The reporter looked at it, and some copied textbooks, and some copied Chinese and foreign reference books borrowed from the library. Upon reporter’s inquiry, these stores can undertake the business of copying teaching materials. Most of them are printed on both sides at a price of 10 cents each, bound in 2 yuan, with 4-5 cents for double-sided copying and 10 cents for single-sided copying. If the quantity is large, you can get a discount. If you want to install the cover, you can add 2 yuan. There are also price concessions for large quantities.
In a copy shop of another university, a big red advertisement of "Printing and Copying Textbooks" is posted at the door, and a bibliography of university public courses such as "15-year history outline, military theory, comprehensive English listening and speaking, advanced B (Part II)" is also posted on the wall. There is Yin Gao, a half-meter-high semi-finished English pronunciation practice manual for freshmen, beside the printer, and there is "Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press" on the copyright page. The staff admitted that this is a "list" for class group purchase. "You should make a list, write down the title of the book to be printed, and then indicate how many copies of each book to print, and then write down your name and contact number, so that we won’t make a mistake — — This is what other classes do. "
Pointing to a stack of blue-covered photocopied "teaching materials", the store owner said that these are the best-selling teaching materials posted on the wall, and there are more than a dozen books that have not been sold out in batch print this school season. "When business is good, hundreds of people come to the store to queue up to buy textbooks every day, and many of them send class cadres to buy them. In order to save time, the commonly used textbooks and teaching materials are simply scanned into electronic versions for printing and copying. " When the reporter of Beiqing Daily asked if it was possible to copy the History of China News Communication, the store readily turned on the computer to help search for the electronic version of the book. The folder named "Customer Information" contained hundreds of electronic versions of teaching materials, mostly PDF-based. "The reason why our store is popular is also because the public courses and professional books are complete."
In the survey, most of the staff of various printing shops said that they had not heard of the policy news to be inspected in the near future for the time being. "The business of copying books has been done for many years, and I have never heard of it." A student from a university in Beijing told the reporter of Beiqing Daily that in the past, the print shop in the school would sell some printed textbooks to students at the beginning of the school year, but since last semester, this phenomenon has been "rare". Some shopkeepers also responded that if students bring books or electronic books to the store for copying, they will print them as required and stop selling them in batches because "hoarding goods is easy to lose money".
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Student: Buying a copy of a textbook can save more than half of the money compared with a new book.
The students interviewed at random explained the reasons for the popularity of copying textbooks. On the one hand, except for higher vocational colleges and private colleges, many colleges and universities in Beijing do not uniformly subscribe for textbooks when freshmen enter school, and students have the initiative to buy textbooks themselves. On the other hand, books bought from printing shops are cheaper than genuine new books, and the printing quality is good, so copying textbooks is naturally favored by everyone. The pirated books in these print shops will be more popular if there are notes left by previous students.
"Some original textbooks are too expensive. If you buy a printed version from a print shop, it will generally cost more than 10 yuan; Moreover, some books have the key points drawn by seniors and sisters, and you can help yourself review them before the exam. I feel that buying such books is quite cost-effective. " A student who has purchased printed textbooks many times told the reporter of Beiqing Daily.
Take the textbook History of Journalism and Communication in China published by Renmin University of China Press, which has 404 pages and is priced at 45 yuan. If you copy at the price of 5 cents a page in the store, a copy of teaching materials can save more than half of the money than buying new books. According to the rough statistics of the reporter of Beiqing Daily, after four years of undergraduate study, if dozens of specialized course textbooks are copied, a student can save nearly 1,000 yuan in textbook purchase fees.
Print shop: The monthly income from copying textbooks is nearly 10,000.
According to reports, last spring, the Higher Education Society visited 27 colleges and universities in 7 provincial capital cities and the surrounding copy shops, and found that most of the business of these copy shops thought that students copied books. Not only that, these stores will scan public course books, professional course books and best-selling books according to the curriculum and examination time, archive the electronic files of the copied books, provide students with optional bibliographies for copying, and bind them into books after output as needed, forming an industrial chain of "arranging", printing and loading. This leads to another question: how much profit can the business of copying teaching materials in university print shops bring to businesses? Take "Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought and Socialism with Chinese characteristics’s Theoretical System (Revised Edition 2010)" published by Higher Education Press as an example. The text of this book has 398 pages, 25 prints, and the price is 23 yuan, with an average of 0.92 yuan/print. According to the calculation of 4 page numbers of each copy in the copy shop, the whole volume is copied at 0.05 yuan/face, and the price of the whole book is 10 yuan, which is equivalent to 4.4 fold of the genuine price. Excluding the cost of manpower, consumables and rent, the actual profit of each textbook can be maintained around 3 yuan by copying a single textbook.
During the visit, many stores in Haidian also revealed to the reporter of Beiqing Daily that in addition to receiving copying orders on campus, they will also solicit batch copying services from other universities and teaching units through QQ online. A staff member of a copy shop explained, "There are also some customers from middle schools, educational institutions and even trans-regions who come to us to print teaching AIDS. The monthly income from copying textbooks alone is almost 10,000. "
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Teaching materials are necessities, and market-oriented pricing is difficult for students.
It has been suggested that the high price of university textbooks is an important reason for the prosperity of campus copy managers. So, is the pricing of genuine university textbooks reasonable? The reporter of Beiqing Daily browsed the prices of some textbooks in Tsinghua University Textbook Center, and found that few textbooks are below 20 yuan, most of which are priced between 20 yuan and 50 yuan, and some are above 50 yuan. The staff of a famous university publishing house in Haidian responded, "The university textbooks in China are not expensive. The price of a 300-page textbook with ordinary binding is almost 20-30 yuan. Compared with the pricing of hundreds of RMB in foreign university textbooks, this price is really not expensive."
He also said that the publishing house had received complaints from university professors, saying that many students took copies of textbooks in class, and the textbooks in this class were written by themselves. "If all students use photocopied textbooks, the hard work of the editors will not be respected, let alone protect their legitimate rights and interests."
However, college students have another feeling about whether textbooks are expensive. Compared with primary and secondary school textbooks priced by the government, university textbooks, which are also necessities, are much more expensive. The reporter of Beiqing Daily searched online for the price of a complete set of textbooks (color version) of compulsory mathematics in senior high school. There are five books in this set, covering three years in senior high school, and the total price is 42.3 yuan. However, the price of college students majoring in mathematics and statistics who only buy the genuine textbooks of advanced mathematics has surpassed that of 80 yuan, nearly twice as high. Compared with senior high schools, there are many specialized courses and public compulsory courses in universities, and there are usually twenty or thirty courses in a four-year academic system. The interviewed engineering junior boys told reporters that the cost of ordering new textbooks in the first school year spent 800 yuan. "When we first went to college, we all bought new textbooks, which was really much more expensive than high school. Later, when we were sophomore and junior, we bought second-hand books from our brothers and sisters." However, because many graduates still want to keep professional books, the second-hand teaching materials they can buy are usually limited to public courses such as politics and English, so copying teaching materials has become the way for the students and classmates to buy.
Copying teaching materials is still in the marginal zone of supervision
In order to further clarify the supervision status of print shops in colleges and universities, the reporter of Beiqing Daily recently called the Legal Supervision Office of Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Corps and asked whether "copying and selling textbooks in large quantities on campus is within its supervision scope". The staff said that the cultural administrative law enforcement department has conditions for filing a case, and we will not intervene before filing a case. "As you have reflected, it is necessary to analyze the specific situation. There is no certain amount and scale of reprinting and conclusive sales evidence. Generally, the copyright owner and the publishing house come forward to negotiate with the copy shop. When talking about the conditions for filing a case, she also said that the first is to confirm the infringement, and the second is to violate the public interest. For example, piracy and reprinting violate the relevant national laws and regulations.
What attitude does the school take towards the printing shop’s copying of teaching materials? The teacher of the Logistics Department of a science and engineering college in Haidian replied that most of these print shops in the school are self-operated and only rent the school place, and the Logistics Department often reminds the print shop owners to abide by relevant laws and regulations to prevent them from pirating and selling books in batches. "The school will continue to work hard in this regard. On the one hand, it will strengthen the management of print shops on campus, and on the other hand, it will remind students to use formal textbooks and consciously resist piracy." The staff said.
The reporter of Beiqing Daily also learned from the anti-piracy alliance of Beijing 15th Society that the copy shops around the campus have become the focus of many publishers’ rights protection. However, in their daily work, they found that there are also "blind spots" in the handling of infringement of copy shops. For example, most copy shops only copy the text of books, and when binding, they are accompanied by a cover that only prints the title of the book, omitting the publishing unit, author and trademark of the original book. Even if law enforcement officers find the copied finished products, there is no way to obtain the copyright information of the copies to clarify the infringed objects. Secondly, the owner of the copy shop is very vigilant, and generally does not put a large number of copied finished products on the counter, which makes it very difficult for the right holder to defend his rights and the law enforcement department to investigate and deal with it. This group/reporter Liu Xu Lei Jia Wang Xiaoyun
Experts say
Copying officially published books and selling them constitute infringement.
Does it constitute infringement for students to copy textbooks in batches and other officially published books and buy pirated books in copy shops? What kind of tort liability should a copy shop bear if it infringes? In this regard, the reporter of Beiqing Daily interviewed Zhao Zhanling, a special researcher at the Intellectual Property Center of China University of Political Science and Law.
Zhao Zhanling said that the Copyright Law stipulates that "translating or copying a few published works for school classroom teaching or scientific research for teaching or scientific research, but not publishing and distributing" belongs to the category of fair use, and copying textbooks and other books by students and teachers for personal study and research purposes does not constitute infringement, nor does a copy shop. However, if a copy shop copies books by itself and sells them to customers for profit, it constitutes infringement.
How many copies of a book constitute infringement? In Zhao Zhanling’s view, although there is no specific provision in the Copyright Law, as long as a printing shop copies books for profit, it constitutes infringement, which has nothing to do with the amount of copying. Zhao Zhanling also said that whether copying paper books or printing electronic versions of books such as Word and PDF, as long as they are printed, this constitutes infringement.
Regarding the legal responsibility that the printing shop should bear, Zhao Zhanling said that this constitutes a civil infringement, and the copy shop should stop the infringement and compensate the obligee for the losses if it has the above acts. "The copy shop is a self-employed small shop, and it is difficult to determine how much loss has been caused by the obligee, but it can be compensated according to the income from infringement." Zhao Zhanling believes that because the books copied by the printing shops are scattered, it is difficult for publishers and authors to give evidence when defending their rights, which makes publishers and authors not pursue this in law too much.
Zhao Zhanling also suggested that the internal managers of colleges and universities can take relevant measures to manage the copy shops on campus, and students should also enhance their legal awareness, and only use the copied books for their own study and not sell them externally. Text/reporter Li Mengting
