Dear Mark,

I belong to a group of mainly academic lawyers who are researching
the HECA, Higher Education Copyright Accord, which deals with the
reproduction of Copyright material in HE.

We believe that HE and educational institutions generally are being
unfairly taxed under the provisions of the HECA by the requirement
to pay royalties for the reproduction of cprt material for
educational purposes.

The reasons we think this, are that academic publishers are already
subsidised by the state educational sector in that they do not pay
academic authors the true cost of producing academic books and
articles. The libraries of educational institutions are a captive
market and pay generously for academic books and journals. On top of
all this the publishers want to be paid a third time when academics
want to use copyright material for students in educational
institutions (very little of which gets back to the academic authors
who produce the stuff in the first place). One of the consequences
of the HECA is that one of our supporters was required by his
publisher to pay a royalty for reproducing his own published
material for his own students.

This situation has only arisen in the last few years since the
introduction of the HECA. Before that we could produce study-paks,
lecture hand-outs, etc fairly freely under the 'fair dealing
provisions'. In some countries in the worl this is still the case.

I will be sending a questionnaire through lis-link to librarians
asking if they have experienced an increase in theft and/or
mutilation or razoring of books or journals in the last few years
which may be related to the inability of lecturers and teachers to
photocopy materials for students these days.

I am also personally interested, like you, in the increase in theft
and mutilation of library books and any proposals or systems to
combat it. To that end I drafted the attached questionnaire which I
intended to circulate independently of the HECA questionnaire, which
was intended to be a rough and ready, easily answered survey just to
give us an idea if there was any correlation of theft/mutilation
with the cange in the law.

I thought you might be interested in my questionnaire and I wondered
why you were restricting yourself to theft and not including
mutilation, which in the case of 'razoring' often amounts to theft
of an article or a few pages of a book.

I would be interested in your comments.

Tom Davidson.
Law School
Uni. of North London.

----------------------
Tom Davidson
[log in to unmask]