The Irish Copyright Licensing Agency has begun a campaign to encourage the reporting of copyright infringement in third-level educational institutions. This would allow the ICLA to assist the copyright-owners to sue for damages, the agency said.
Publishers and authors were putting pressure on the ICLA to ensure that universities and other third-level institutions observed copyright law, said its chairman, Mr Michael Gill. Although the ICLA had offered licences to these institutions at very reasonable rates, very few had taken it up.
"Our mandating publishers are becoming impatient with the abuse of their rights in third-level institutions. Publishing is an expensive business, and is only made more expensive by the wholesale infringement that goes on in colleges and in the copying shops around them," said Mr Gill.
"The third-level colleges think that by holding out for new legislation they can avoid the reasonable remuneration to which copyrightowners are entitled for the use of their work. But no legislation will deny to those owners the rights to which they are entitled under the international Copyright Conventions, and those rights are already enshrined in the Copyright Act of 1963."