Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Easy

PT123 S1 P1 Q4 Explanation

Course Packs and Copyrights

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsFive QuestionsLaw

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Passage

In a recent court case, a copy-shop owner was accused of violating copyright law when, in the preparation of “course packs”—materials photocopied from books and journals and packaged as readings for particular university courses—he copied materials without obtaining permission from or paying sufficient fees to the publishers. As the owner of five that the copying of course packs was done by a copy shop and at a profit.

Copyright law outlines several factors involved in determining whether the use of copyrighted material is protected, including: whether it is for commercial or nonprofit purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the length and importance of the excerpt used in relation to the entire work; and the effect of its use on the works he copied; he charged by the page, regardless of whether the content was copyrighted.

In the court’s view, the business of producing and selling course packs is more properly seen as the exploitation of professional copying technologies and a result of the inability of academic parties to reproduce printed materials efficiently, not the exploitation of these copyrighted materials themselves. The court held that copyright laws do a third party in order to obtain those same copies at lesser cost.

What this question is testing

Five Questions

Your task

Pin down exactly what the question asks about the passage — a detail, the author's view, the structure, or the main point — before looking at the choices.

Common trap

Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.

Winning move

Anticipate the answer in your own words from the passage, then find the choice that matches that prediction.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
4.

The information in the passage provides the most support for which one of the following statements

Answer choices

  1. Too Strong: most complex / any6% picked this

    Copyright law can be one of the most complex areas of

    This isn’t as strong as saying “copyright is THE most complex area of any legal system”, but it’s almost there, which is still too strong. The passage never compares the complexity of copyright law to any other area of law (nor does it generalize about copyright law across all legal systems).

  2. Out of Scope: inconsistent5% picked this

    Courts have been inconsistent in their interpretations of certain provisions of

    The word inconsistent is s synonym for “contradictory”. Does the passage show contradictory interpretations of certain provisions? One court interpreted provision A to mean X. Another court interpreted provision A to mean not-X? No, there’s nothing like that.

  3. Out of Scope: steadily decreasing1% picked this

    The number of the kinds of materials granted protection under copyright law

    Nowhere in the passage can we find it saying that a steadily decreasing number of materials are granted protection.

  4. Correct84% picked this

    New practices can compel the courts to refine how copyright law

    Why this is right

    On a first pass, this the clear top contender due to strength of language. It’s just saying that “New practices can compel courts to refine how copyright law is applied”. This passage seems to be an example of that. The practice of creating course packs was a new practice that forced the courts to weigh in on whether copyright restrictions should / shouldn’t apply. How do we know it was “new”? In part, common sense, because if the court had already ruled on course packs then there would be a clear precedent for this case and we wouldn’t get the feeling that court was trying to figure out how to rule. The final sentence of the first paragraph says, “This case was unique in that __.”, which shows that this was breaking new ground. How do we know that the court refined how copyright law is applied? The beginning of the final paragraph is saying, “In the court’s view, the business of producing and selling course packs is more properly seen (going forward) as ___.” Overall this correct answer falls into the category of, “It’s hard to point to great support sentences”, but this answer has the most moderate language and is saying something very reasonable that we can support by combining what the passage told us with our common sense about how the legal system works.

    Skill tested: Five Questions · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  5. Too Strong: primarily4% picked this

    Copyright law is primarily concerned with making published materials available for

    We can’t find anywhere in the text to support that the #1 concern of copyright law is to make published materials available for educational use. That doesn’t make any common sense, either. If you asked someone off the street, “What is the primary concern of copyright law?”, there’s no chance they would say “to make published materials available for educators”.

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