Copyright and the story of two books

Abstract

The paper discusses the problems of libraries arising from the educational sector reforms in the late 1980s with its attendant scarcity and high price of books in the face of high student enrolment is tertiary institutions. The paper goes on to discuss how copyright restriction add an additional difficulty to access to information and illustrates this with two rare books with very inadequate copies used by 918 students at the College of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences, University of Ghana, Legon during the 2007/2008 academic year. Whist the paper agrees that the copyright law exists to crate incentives for authors, the paper is of the view that because of high price and scarcity of books many students are compelled to engage in photocopying rather than a deliberate attempt to cheat copyright owners. The paper also pointed out that in the present technological era people see reward not only in monetary terms.