One day last winter at the college where I teach, I stood waiting for a copier/printer to complete a job so that I could photocopy a letter. Initially, I paid little attention to the pages landing in the printer discharge slot.
Then I noticed the material was repeating itself. Every third page was identical to the one printed three pages earlier. The photocopied pages, I noticed, came from a book. The printer kept spitting out the sequence until nearly 50 versions of the same three pages had piled up. Somebody somewhere in the building was copying the book excerpt and planning, I guessed, to circulate copies among students. The person didn’t realize the copying was happening at this printer in my corner of the college, because he never came to pick up the copies.
“Who would waste all this paper?” I thought.
Then, I got even more ticked off that the person doing the mass printing was simply ripping off the author – copying all those pages and giving away the content for nothing. Lawyers call it a breach of copyright.