Case Comment The Chancellor, Masters Scholars Of The...

Case Comment: The Chancellor, Masters Scholars Of The University Of Oxford Ors VS Rameshwari Photocopy Services ANR. In the High Court of Delhi at New Delhi 2016 SCC OnLine Del 5128 Decided on 16-09-2016 Before MR.Justice Rajiv Sahai. Introduction: It is common practice, across universities in India, for faculty to prepare reading materials and course packs made up of extracts from academic works for classroom discussion purposes. This is essential to the teaching process as the prices of most of the titles are well outside the reach of almost all students and even otherwise, it would be difficult to expect students to purchase 10-15 books every semester just to read the relevant passages necessary for the course. As anyone who has studied in any institution of higher education in this country would know, academic titles are prohibitively expensive. This has partly to do with the oligopolistic nature of the business itself, dominated as it is by a handful of large multinational publishers and partly to do with the lack of sufficient monetary incentive to make all titles available for cheap in India. Facts of the Case: The five plaintiffs, namely i) Oxford University Press, ii) Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom (UK), iii) Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd., iv) Taylor Francis Group, U.K. and, v) Taylor Francis Books India Pvt. Ltd., being the publishers, including of textbooks, instituted this suit for the relief of permanent injunction