Does Photocopying Course Packs Constitute Fair Use?
For many years, it has been customary for professors to photocopy packets of materials for classroom use by students. The intended purpose is to provide students with relatively small excerpts from a collection of copyrighted texts. This will avoid the expense of having to purchase all of the works from which excerpts were taken. This making of multiple copies for classroom use has been viewed as a fair use of the larger copyrighted works. More recent technological advances have caused once-traditional paper course packs to give way to multimedia presentations made available to students as classroom presentations or on Internet/Intranet web sites. Even with this express recognition of multiple copies of a copyrighted work for classroom use, such copying has not always been found to be fair use. In an action for copyright infringement brought against the Kinko’s copy shops, a court held that preparation of course packs for classroom use by students at the request of their professors did
