My, how the world has changed
September 1st, 2007 -- by Augie De Blieck Jr.
Back in the days before the internet, serious research was conducted in the library. A key productivity tool would be a pocket filled with nickels and the coin-op photocopier. You could plop the library’s copy of your resarch material onto the glass and plug a nickel in for a photocopy (or “a Xerox”) of the relevant passages.
Nowadays, I wonder if there’s any sort of lawyering happening to prevent such unauthorized duplication of copyrighted materials. I guess it’s not the DMCA, though so many photocopiers are digital these days. Or did the book industry get over this already thirty years ago?
September 2nd, 2007 at 12:22 am
Not only that..but in most universities, the “copy center” would glady photocopy any book - cover to cover - that you brought them with a smile.
By the time I graduated - the copyright Nazi’s had sprung into place and forbade such a practice, leaving starving students to stay long hours at the crappy and under-maintained copy machines that littered the hallways. Thank God - the copy centers situated just outside the unversity’s doors had no such “upper crust” moral values.