Although 97 percent of college students know photocopying textbooks is illegal, 52 percent of them still copied books cover to cover, a survey showed yesterday.
The poll showed that 24.3 percent of respondents had made cover-to-cover copies of Mandarin textbooks, 9 percent had done so with foreign-language textbooks, while 18.5 percent of the students said they had copied both.
Almost 63 percent of students who had previously made copies of textbooks from cover to cover repeated the practice during this semester, the survey said.
The poll was commissioned by the Taiwan Book Publishers Association and conducted by National Chengchi University’s Public Opinion and Market Poll Center on 1,000 randomly selected college students between Sept. 26 and Oct. 15.
In Taiwan, it is common for college students to copy part or every chapter of a textbook assigned by their teachers.
Students have defended themselves by complaining about the price of textbooks, particularly foreign-language books.
Under the Copyright Act (著作權法), teachers and students can copy part of a book to use as teaching material, but they are banned from copying it from cover to cover.
Government agencies have made inspection trips to photocopying stores near universities to clamp down on illegal photocopying of textbooks over the past few years.
As many as 57.2 percent of students at public universities said they had made copies of textbooks, while 50.4 percent of their counterparts at private universities said they had done so, the poll showed.
The survey found that students majoring in languages and literature tended to commit the offense more often than students majoring in social sciences, medicine or engineering.
The survey also showed that students with higher monthly allowances were more likely to copy an entire textbook instead of buying it.
A total of 43.2 percent of those polled said they copied textbooks because they were too expensive, while 52.3 percent said they wanted to save money even though they could afford the books.
Nearly 20 percent of the students said they had copied the books because “everyone else was doing it.”
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