This September, the Delhi High Court in India ruled in favor of Delhi University (DU) photocopying college textbooks from many major publishers on the ground that “copyright . . . is . . . not an inevitable, divine or natural right” in comparison to the value of education.[1] The suit arose in 2012 from international publishers including Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press complaining of DU’s library and authorized copyshop selling course packs of “photocopied portions of different books prescribed by DU as suggested reading in its syllabus.”[2] Although this may seem like a blatant infringement of the publishers’ copyrights by U.S. standards, the High Court concluded that the University was exempt from liability because Section 52 of the Indian Copyright Act provides an infringement exception to educational institutions.[3] In other words, because the photocopying was done for “imparting education” and not for commercial reasons, both the copyshop and the University’s acts are protected.[4]
The balance between fostering education and protecting copyrights is heavily debated around the world. It is worth noting that the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals heard an almost identical issue to that of the Delhi High Court’s case in Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services. In the landmark case, the court held that a copyshop’s selling of coursepacks for University of Michigan students similar to those at issue in the Delhi High Court case were not protected under fair use doctrine, due to the copyshop being a commercial entity undercutting a theoretical “copyshop license” market.[5] Thus, although the copyshop did not choose the materials to include in the coursepacks, and the coursepacks were used for educational purposes, the copyshop was held liable to the publisher plaintiffs.[6]
As a result, U.S. law seems to disagree with India’s valuation of education over copyright protection. Although the outcome of the Indian case will not have any direct effect on U.S. copyright law, domestic publishers and similar right-holders will surely feel its effect. Now, domestic right-holders will have to find a way to deal with the fact that a country of over 1.3 billion people does not view their copyright as “a divine right,” and may influence other neighboring countries to take a similar stance.