INFORMATION ON THE SURVEY CONCERNING THE STRUCTURE OF WORKS DUPLICATED AT PHOTOCOPY OUTLETS BETWEEN 2006 - 2022
The survey was conducted on behalf of the KOPIPOL Associationby the CEM Institute of Market and Public Opinion Research Institute.
Originally, the purpose of the survey was to estimate the share of individual categories of works (according to the Copyright and Related Rights Act) in the total number of materials duplicated in photocopy outlets. The study included estimates of the share of works by Polish and foreign authors and translations from foreign languages into Polish. Additional goals were introduced in the survey waves that followed in the subsequent years. Those were: identifying the publishers of duplicated materials, determining the country of origin of the duplicated materials understood as the country of publisher’s registered seat, evaluating the ratio between the number of pages copied from books and from journals.
The survey was designed for cyclic repetition in order to accumulate the highest possible quantity of material to form a basis for the evaluation of the structure of duplicated works. In the first and second waves (2006 and 2007), five cities were subject to inspection. Due to the need to reduce the scope of survey, in 2008 the scope was modified for subsequent years in such a way that each subsequent wave was to cover one of the five previously surveyed cities and one not covered by previous research. In 2012, KOPIPOL decided to include in the five-city study three cities that had already been investigated, and two cities that had never been observed. The goal of extending geographic coverage over the long term was to increase the chance of obtaining observations of those materials that may be less well represented in the five largest centres covered by the original study. Thus, in the studies planned for subsequent years, observations were extended over both the main academic centres examined to date and the cities not included in previous studies.
By the end of 2017, nine survey waves had been completed: in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2017. Materials collected in successive waves were added to the materials collected earlier thus creating a cumulative database. Such a procedure allowed the ever-closer approximation of the structure of actually duplicated materials. In subsequent years, the procedure for adding up new observations was accompanied by a procedure for reducing the weight of the oldest works (included in the oldest database).
Other information carriers used to duplicate works (electronic copies, printouts from portable storage media) in the copy shops were also included in the study.
The methodology of the study was developed in cooperation with the KOPIPOL Association and Traple Konarski Podrecki and Partners law firm. The design of the study including a description of the methods to be used was sent to interested associations (ZAIKS, SARP, ZPAP, ZPAF, STL) with a request for any comments or suggestions. The feedback was submitted by the Association of Polish Architects (SARP). The SARP’s suggestions were thoroughly analyzed by both the CEM, KOPIPOL and Traple Konarski Podrecki and Partners and used to establish the final shape of the data collection approach.
The collections of materials copied at photocopy outlets represented the study population. The first two waves covered the outlets located in five major cities due to their dominant position in the overall volume of duplicated materials: Krakow, Warsaw, Lodz, Wroclaw and Poznan (these are also the cities gathering the largest student populations). In subsequent waves, new centres were included in the study: Katowice, Lublin, Gdansk, Bydgoszcz, Szczecin, Olsztyn, Rzeszow, Kielce, Opole, Białystok, Toruń.
Each study wave in subsequent years consisted of two stages. At the first stage, a list of copy shops in randomly selected areas of individual cities and a list of outlets located at universities were made. The second stage involved observation at randomly selected outlets.
The procedure for selecting photocopy outlets for the study in each wave was multistage. In the first step, all available outlets located at universities and those available to general public in randomly selected city quarters were listed. Then a stratified random sampling scheme was used for choosing photocopy outlets. Two strata were formed covering the city centre area and the area outside the city centre, assuming that the number of outlets located in the city centre is higher and the quantity of duplicated material is much higher than outside the centre. Hundred outlets including 40 located in city centres were randomly selected in each of the first two waves of the study. An additional sample of 100 outlets located at universities was selected, assuming (based on the pilot studies) that the vast majority of the copyrighted material is reproduced at such locations.
Due to the need to limit the scope of study, the number of outlets covered by the observation was reduced in consecutive years. In the third wave, the city-related sample included 20 outlets randomly selected from the list of outlets located in town centres, with the additional 40 university outlets as overrepresentation. In the fourth wave, observation covered 10 city centre outlets in three cities (30 in total) and 20 outlets in each selected university (60 in total). In the fifth wave of study, 10 outlets in each city centre selected (50 in total) and 20 outlets in each university (100 in total) were observed. In the sixth wave, a total of 21 points were observed in city centres (5 in each of the 3 cities and 6 in one city) and 75 university outlets. The results were analysed using the data weighting procedures for matching the quantitative structure of the photocopy outlets to the estimated structure of the outlets in the cities covered by the study. In the seventh wave, the survey was conducted at 25 outlets in city centres and at 69 university copy shops. In the eighth wave, the observation was carried out in 50 city centre outlets and at 108 university copy shops. In the ninth wave observations were made at 30 city and 105 university sites.
Prior to the commencement of each wave of study, the Rectors of all colleges and universities in the cities surveyed were informed of the purpose of the study and asked for permission to conduct the observation. In cases of refusal, the photocopy outlets at the given university were not recruited for the study (although the observations were to be conducted only at sites with general public access).
The study targeted photocopy outlets understood as all types of locations providing photocopying services, including those where photocopying was an off-line kind of activity, e.g., kiosks. All materials, both in paper and in electronic form, copied or purchased as copies in randomly selected half-hour periods in the randomly selected outlets were subject to survey. If several copy machines worked at an outlet, the study material came from all these machines.
The material collection procedure was to obtain a second copy of all materials (other than personal documents) that were duplicated or purchased by customers during observation. In addition, investigators collected information on duplicated materials and filled out questionnaires about the material (author, title, category, number of duplicated pages, etc.). The material collected in the study included not only copies made, but also materials purchased at that time. The study covered the reproduction of electronic materials (brought on electronic media) that were either printed or copied onto another electronic medium.
At the end of the observation at the photocopy outlets, the materials were classified by category (folk art, scientific, technical, musical, literary, architectural, photographic, artistic creations) and the language (Polish, foreign, translation). Starting from the third wave, the publisher that issued a given work was also identified. In cases where a second copy could not be made or if the material could not be uniquely identified on the basis of the photocopy, the duplicated materials were found by the staff in libraries and classified on the basis of the overview of the material and the information collected by the interviewers during the observation (author, edition, number of duplicated pages). The classification was done twice, by two teams of staff, to avoid subjective material classification.
As from the sixth wave of the study in 2013, additional coding of the scientific discipline to which the reproduced scientific and technical work belonged was introduced. For this purpose, the systematics of scientific areas introduced by the Regulation of the Minister of Science and Higher Education of 8 August 2011 concerning areas of knowledge, science and arts as well as arts and science disciplines (Dz.U. of 2011, No. 179, item 1065) was used. The systematics introduces a three-tiered division into areas, fields and disciplines. For the purpose of classifying the data, an intermediate level was used – the division into fields of science.
The main outcome of the study is the estimation of the structure of duplicated materials in terms of type of work (folk art, scientific, technical, musical, literary, architectural, photographic and artistic creations), the estimation of the percentage of particular fields of science in reproduced scientific and technical works and the estimation of the percentage of particular publishers in the duplicated scientific and technical works.
The cyclic nature of study waves, the annual inclusion of successive cities in the scope of study, as well as repeated measurements at the main academic centersprovide extensive research perspective and guarantee high representativeness of results. Analysis of the results over the years proves that the structure of materials copied in commercial reprographic outlets is characterized by high stability, and invariably scientific and technical works are the dominant type of works copied at these sites.
