Associate Professor of Communications Ronald Bettig says that if publishers ask too much for a document he cuts them from his course pack as though they were malignant lumps of greed. But what happens to a democracy when professors routinely resort to such cost-saving "surgery?"

Do we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous profit when the free flow of scholarly ideas becomes intellectual "property," and publishers construct dams at educational tributaries? In a recent lawsuit (Princeton University Press vs. MDS, 6th Cir. 1996), publishers sued a copy shop and won. The court ruled that a copy shop could not legally create course packs without prostrating themselves to publishers. If publishers refused to grant permission to copy excerpts, so be it. If they charged too much, too bad. When the interests of capital supercede the reasonable interests of the majority, democracy keels over with a bloody arrow protruding from its educational temples. In this respect, the court botched an opportunity to breathe new life into a democracy choked by the long fingers of cash and the strong arms of the law.

According to Bettig, "Two hundred years ago Jefferson and Madison voiced their concern that intellectual property could become too concentrated. What they feared is upon us!" Copy shops and universities now live in mortal fear of expensive copyright infringement suits. Madison might have been a soothsayer when he said: "Where power is in the few, it is natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own partialities and corruptions." In "Copyrighting Culture," Bettig observes that five of the original 13 states had copyright laws that stipulated "if the copyright owner, author or publisher sets an unreasonable price on any book, that is, above the costs figured for labor, expenses, and risk, the court could in fact set a reasonable price. Similarly, if a copyright owner limited the supply of a work, the court could grant a license to publish it to another party." If we are to become all that we are capable of becoming as a nation, we must wedge a bit of "free speech" into the educational space that nowadays pays mucho pesos for course packs.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a lower court's "copy shop decision," we continue to wander through copyright limbo. No one really knows what to do. Can professors, if they don't make a profit, legally photocopy their own course packs? Can students, if they copy only educational materials, go photocopy crazy? Maybe we should ask why professors don't just drop course packs from their course requirements? Bettig responds that "course packs allow professors to assemble a diversity of viewpoints, and for this reason they are pedagogically more valuable than relying exclusively on textbooks."

On the other hand, Sanford G. Thatcher, chairman of the Copyright Committee of the Association of American University Presses (and a member of The Daily Collegian Board of Directors) argues that "university presses have viewed calls for more extensive fair use and changes in copyrights law as direct threats to their own enterprise, the contribution of which they believe to be equally in the best interest of the future of scholarly communication." He adds that "aggressive fair use may benefit teachers in the short term, but if its effect ultimately is to constrain university presses from publishing new scholarly monographs, the interests of those teachers who are also authors seeking advancement in their careers through publication will not be well-served."

I believe that one of the ways Congress could "unmuddle" this mess is to create a "National Endowment for Scholarly Works" to fund the electronic publication of all research materials produced in the academy and and to remunerate academic authors in some acceptable fashion. The price of both textbooks and course packs (for students) would plummet. Students could then legally download texts and course packs or purchase hard copies produced exclusively by university presses.

In the meantime, Bettig requires students to purchase a textbook if more than 10 percent of it is utilized in class. This practice seems more than fair to me because I would purchase non-required textbooks after reading interesting excerpts in a required course pack.