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    Probe Targets Textbook Photocopying at Universities

    In an attempt to quash unlawful duplication, China clamps down on campus mom-and-pop print shops.

    Authorities in China are cracking down on print shops that make illegal, low cost copies of textbooks for cash-strapped students.

    Some of them are created from illegally downloaded digital versions of books and are commonly used by Chinese university students, many of whom cannot afford to pay full price for the textbooks required for their classes.

    Tuesday marked World Intellectual Property Day.

    In recent months, Chinese authorities have been targeting the small shops that are peppered throughout many university campuses in China.

    As part of a campaign that started in February, police stormed print shops near universities in the provinces of Hebei, Fujian and Anhui, as well as in the city of Shanghai.

    The authorities impounded thousands of pirated books, according to a report in the China Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League.

    Reprinting or photocopying a book is an easy way for students to get their hands on textbooks they can’t afford or are reluctant to spend money on — especially when some books are only needed for occasional reference.

    Shi Jinxing, a graduate student of economics at Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, told Sixth Tone that price was a major factor in his decision to visit photocopying shops in search of copied books.

    On one occasion, Shi paid 59 yuan ($9) for a copy of “Econometric Theory and Methods” by Russell Davidson and James G. MacKinnon. The paperback version of the 768-page book from the Oxford University Press sells for 875 yuan on the Chinese portal of Amazon — almost double its price in the U.S.

    Zou Li, owner of the Tongji Photocopying Shop at Tongji University in Shanghai, said that she used to photocopy a lot of books for students, some of whom brought digital books to be printed, but no longer does so. “We have stopped photocopying published books,” Zou said.

    Still others say that while the textbook prices in some cases were still affordable, they didn’t get to use them enough to justify the expenditure.

    The campaign was initiated by five central government agencies, including the National Anti-Pornography and Anti-Illegal Publications Office, and the Ministry of Education.

    Educators say that as long as there is demand for photocopied materials, the business of illicit photocopying won’t go away.

    On Taobao, for example, photocopying services are available at 0.03 yuan (less than half of one cent) per A4-sized page.

    According to Gao Qiang, a lawyer in the copyright department of the law firm Dentons, there are no legal consequences for students who photocopy books in China, so long as the copying is for academic studies or for personal rather than commercial use. Finally, the materials being copied must already have been published. In other words, photocopying items that have not been officially published by the copyright owner constitutes copyright infringement.

    But shops both online and offline must ask for permission from the copyright owners before they photocopy, or they break the law, Gao added.

    According to the same report in China Youth Daily, the National Anti-Pornography and Anti-Illegal Publications Office investigated 2,194 copyright infringement cases and confiscated nearly 6.8 million copies of pirated publications in 2015.

    Still , some question the effectiveness of the campaign. On a recent visit to a print shop at Fudan University that claimed to have abandoned the practice of textbook photocopying, Sixth Tone discovered one machine busy churning out copied pages from a textbook written in Korean.

    With contributions from Fan Jialai and Wang Lianzhang.

    (Header image: Students at a photocopying shop at the Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, Shandong province, June 19, 2014.  Liu Tao/VCG)