Cambridge University Press is one of three major publishing companies involved in a dispute over the photocopying of academic course texts at a printing shop at the University of Delhi.The civil suit against Rameshwari Photocopying Service and the University of Delhi centres around the production of ‘coursepacks’, bound collections of photocopied course material.

Protests against the actions of Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis group have grown, with a number of online petitions, and the threat to boycott these publishers at the University of Delhi. A letter signed by the “Students and Faculty of Delhi University” concludes: “[a]s a reaction, if this case is not revoked immediately, we students and faculty members have decided to boycott these three presses. We will actively ensure that no books of these three presses are used in the campus and will urge all teachers not to recommend any books or readings published by them.”

Varsity spoke to Abhishek Bhattacharyya, who has studied at Cambridge, Oxford and Delhi universities, and who has been involved in the protests, specifically in drafting a petition by the members and alumni of Oxford, calling upon OUP to withdraw its case.

Bhattacharyya believes that, “given the way OUP, CUP and Taylor and Francis – the three litigants in this case – hold sway over the academic market, even in India, such a boycott should make things difficult for students, and might also be difficult to enforce.” However, he added that, should the publishing companies win their case, “a boycott of sorts would be enforced upon the vast majority of students anyway – and so a call for boycott is also a way of seizing the initiative and in that sense is certainly practicable. “The call is also meant to express the fact that these publishers’ actions are seriously antagonizing its primary pool of readers and contributors in India, and the campaign in Delhi also seeks to make this a commercially undesirable step.”

The case hinges on two strands of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957. Section 14 (a) of the Act states that copyright, “in the case of a literary, dramatic or musical work” comprises “the exclusive right subject to the provisions of this Act, to do or authorise the doing of any of the following acts in respect of a work or any substantial part thereof”, including, specifically, “(i) to reproduce the work in any material form including the storing of it in any medium by electronic means’ and ‘(ii) to issue copies of the work to the public not being copies already in circulation”.  Indian Politics & Culture Journal The Caravan emphasizes Section 14 (a) as the specific area of copyright that the publishing companies claim is violated by these coursepacks.

However, defenders of the Rameshwari Photocopy Service quote a different section of the 1957 Act. Section 52 lists actions which “shall not constitute an infringement of copyright”, citing “private use, including research’ as part of a so-called ‘fair dealing’ with a literary work. Part of this series of exemptions also includes the reproduction of a work ‘by a teacher or a pupil in the course of instruction”. Whether or not this ‘fair dealing’ has been violated is central to the court case.

Highlighting these legal grounds for defence, Bhattacharyya admits that “this might still function as a test case and lead to the specification of a limit to photocopying for educational purposes […], which would hurt the ability of students to access texts all over India given the different material conditions here.” The petition on change.org – which, at last count, had 877 supporters – asserts that, in keeping with these exemptions to copyright infringement, most of the readings “are for private circulation and academic purposes and not mass produced or produced for mass commercial purposes”.

Bhattacharyya points to his personal experience at all of the universities involved in this debate: “at all three universities I have been in classes where teachers have distributed copies of chapters or sections of books in class, or uploaded scans on something like CamTools. [The] publications of presses based in the global North tend to be more expensive in the global South, in terms of opportunity costs or as a percentage of average national income, and this makes the situation more difficult in a place like Delhi. While these presses remain as powerful as they are, the only way large sections of Indian society can enter this knowledge economy is by photocopying”.

However the three publishers involved, including CUP, have claimed that their aim has never been to forces students to buy their books. Instead they argued that: “the objective of this law suit is not to constrain the student community to buy entire text books, but is merely an effort to encourage and persuade all stakeholders in the academic community to explore the equitable option of securing a license from the Indian Reprographic Rights Organization (IRRO), of which the concerned publishers are members.”

Bhattacharyya believes that “[i]t is important for members of Oxbridge colleges and faculties to express their solidarity with students in different places to avoid appearing complacent in their privileges, and also to build broader struggles when even British education is massively hit by plans to further corporatize things.” He believes that CUP is “seeking to contain knowledge […] within entrenched circuits of privilege’, and that ‘protests by people at Oxford and Cambridge can certainly help the situation.”

In late September there were meetings between IRRO representatives and officials of the Delhi University, which CUP say were “to explore securing a single window license that would facilitate authorized access to a whole range of academic content.” As a result of these meetings Delhi University was ordered to look into the possibility of obtaining a license by the Delhi High Court. In response to the ruling CUP stated that they “sincerely hope this case is amicably resolved through the securing of an IRRO license so that an equitable balance and sustainable solution is achieved.”