members of NYU’s photocopying policies and to encourage them to comply with the Classroom Guidelines.[1]
A few years later came the case with real staying power: Kinko’s, once found in every college town, was sued for copying articles and portions of books and compiling them into coursepacks.[2] Kinko’s argued that the copying was educational because it was done for students at the request of their instructors. Unfortunately for Kinko’s, the court did not agree. Not only did the court describe the copying as non-educational and commercial, but it also criticized Kinko’s internal policies and procedures and its failure to educate and adequately supervise its employees, and held that Kinko’s was a willful infringer.
Michigan Document Services (MDS), an Ann Arbor copyshop, apparently failed to learn any lessons from the Kinko’s decision. In the MDS case, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit considered MDS’s copying “educational” and held that it was a fair use. But MDS’s happiness was short-lived. In an en banc decision (in which all the judges of a circuit sit together), the Sixth Circuit reversed the panel’s decision, holding that the copyshop’s systematic and premeditated copying for commercial motivation was infringing, noting also that MDS’s copying went beyond the Classroom Guidelines.[3]
Litigation against copyshops did not end with the MDS case. The Copyright Clearance Center coordinated separate lawsuits in 2002 and 2003 against copyshops located near universities, with the earlier suit filed against Gainesville, Florida’s Custom Copies & Textbooks,[4] and the latter against Los Angeles-based Westwood Copies.[5] Both defendants settled.[6] In 2005, ten major publishers sued copy shops in the Boston Area that
- ↑ Addison-Wesley Publ’g v. New York Univ., 1983 Copyright L. Dec. (CCH) ¶ 25,544, at 18,203 (S.D.N.Y. 1983).
- ↑ Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko’s Graphics Corp., 758 F. Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y. 1991).
- ↑ Princeton Univ. Press v. Michigan Document Servs., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996).
- ↑ Steven Zeitchik & Judith Rosen, CCC Charges Copy Shop with Infringement, Publishers Wkly., Oct. 21, 2002, at 9.
- ↑ Steven Zeitchik, Four Publishers Sue L.A. Copy Shop, Publishers Wkly., Jan. 27, 2003, at 113.
- ↑ Judith Rosen, CCC Settles with Copy Shop, Publishers Wkly., Mar. 10, 2003, at 18; Judith Rosen, CCC Settles One Suit, Files Another, Publishers Wkly., July 14, 2003, at 12.
