[edit: why do you think FedEx / Kinkos will not copy a book for you and makes you sign a sheet declaring your ownership of material before copying for you]
In Australia there are fairly clear suggestions for what consitutes personal use. A few guidelines are: - you have to do it yourself - you can make a single copy - you can share the copy with members of your household or family, but no one else - if it's a copy of a physical work such as a book or CD, you have to make the copy yourself (ie, you can't download a movie that you own on DVD)
I think no matter how you spin it or try to make it sound like fair use, this is a clear case of unauthorised distribution of someone else's work for a profit. If the matter ended up in court, their intent to follow the spirit of the law would be hard to argue.
Again, these grey areas are where the spirit of intent is going to matter. Is it illegal to pay a neighborhood kid to rip all your CDs to mp3? Technically yes (in Australia), but it seems reasonable to argue that it's within the spirit of format shifting provisions.
Is it illegal for a company to sell customised "newspapers" filled with ad free content taken from ad supported sites? Again, yes. But in this case it feels to me like it may be harder to convince a court that the service is the same as printing out pages from a website on your own printer.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't claim to be an expert. I do think this story has some parallels to the Aereo legal battle that's unfolding right now.
I also think the writer of the original article is a bit up himself.
Edit: maybe "illegal" isn't the right term to use, but rather, "in breach of copyright".
Furthermore, Kinko's solicited professors teaching classes to place orders on behalf of their students, offering a 10% discount to professors who got their orders in early (presumably in the slow weeks before classes start). But the discount was not offered on the production of the course packets - rather, it was a discount (in the form of a faculty discount card) on the professors' own use of Kinko's services. Students paid individually to buy the course packets designed by their professors and unilaterally produced and distributed by Kinko's, based on professors' advice of how many students were taking the class and would (presumably) require the course packets.
How do you get from this that distribution is not several? I see no such conclusion of law in the judgment. I wouldn't rely on on a law dictionary as the sole source, but it is of recent vintage and if distribution were not considered to be several that would be a pretty significant error.
I cannot really add to what you said, and I wasn't thinking of that case, but more the terms of service and training Kinko's has.
"Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Frena"[1] is the specific case that I thought made the rules that this service would fall under and how distribution doesn't require multiple receivers.
also: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=111...
That case has a quote that would seem to nuke this business model: "There is no dispute that Defendant Frena supplied a product containing unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work. It does not matter that Defendant Frena claims he did not make the copies itself." and "Intent or knowledge is not an element of infringement, and thus even an innocent infringer is liable for infringement".
1) http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9942897572725804...
Subscribers can upload...material onto the bulletin board so that any other subscriber, by accessing their computer, can see that material.
To me that's obviously distribution because a) multiple downloaders had access to uploaded material (severality), and b) when a subscriber logged into the BBS, the copyrighted material was already there, listed as available for download (pre-emption).
What I think is different about this new service is that (as far as I can tell) if I use it to generate printed copies of, say, a New Yorker article and 3 Techcrunch articles, the resulting document is sent only to me, is not offered for download or printing to others, and is not retained on the server after the hard copy has been printed and mailed out. Furthermore, I can't select these copyrighted works on the site itself, but must submit URLs of my own choice. So what's being offered here is a reformatting and printing service for an individual only. My use of the service as described above would not make the content in question accessible to you.
Now, if I collected 50 articles into a 'magazine' othat reflected my interests, and that was made available to other customers, then it would certainly be a case of distribution and blatant copyright infringement.
Incidentally, although this situation has superficial similarities to the Aereo case before the Supreme Court at present, I think a key difference is that Aereo pre-emptively stores broadcasted content for later download, and likewise has buolt an infrastructure of receiving antennae which they essentially rent out to customers. In my view Aereo is relying on a flawed post-hoc rationalization of their action, whereas personalpaper.me (as far as I know) didn't hit up any URL until someone requested it to be added to a print queue.