Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier? | Op-Docs
New York Times Opinion4 HN recommenders · 2017–2025
3.1M views · comedy · evergreen · Uploaded 2014-04-28
A New York Times Op-Docs short in which actors perform a real legal deposition transcript. A lawyer gets tangled in an absurd argument with a county employee about what counts as a photocopier, in a dispute over fees for public records.
Commenters share it as a funny, memorable example of evasive depositions and of obstruction over public records requests.
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9 comments from Hacker News
While we wait for someone with legal training to parse this out for us, here's my favorite deposition related thing on the internet: [VIDEO]
Its probably safe to assume that the person you're recommending this to has absolutely no idea about the general concepts of software development, or the rough orders of magnitude of information that is reasonable to store and serve with modern infrastructure available to nearly any small business. Its reminiscent of the willful ignorance displayed by the Cuyahoga County Recorders Office, in Ohio. The office responded to FOIA requests by demanding $2 per photocopy, even though the documents were already stored on CDs. They hoped they could simply make freedom of information too expensive. Their legal argument was that the files could be semantically thought of as photocopies of the documents. Here's a verbatim reenactment of a deposition in the case where a county employee puts on a charade of not knowing that a photocopier is. [VIDEO]
Sidenote - this hilarious deposition was in a case about this exact issue (fees for copies of public records). [VIDEO]
Being THE term is the holy grail for consumer brands. You can only get huge when your brand is the synonym for a whole concept or industry. Like ColaCola, Uber, Facebook, Tweet etc etc. For example Mark's explanation of Facebook [1] or the Photocopier sketch [2] Edit: fixed link order [1] [LINK] (video) [2] [VIDEO] (video)
The NYT has an amazing video where they got actors to play out the transcript of one of these sorts of depositions. [VIDEO]
There is a similar story about an office worker not knowing what a photocopy machine is. The New York Times did an amazing reenactment from transcripts of the legal deposition [VIDEO]
You could run that through a group of kindergartners and 30/30 would tell you he requested a lawyer. It’s only a person with a special kind of learned stupidity, or malice that can claim that they are not sure if it was a request for a lawyer. Reminds me of the “what is a photocopier” dialogue: [VIDEO]
> Over time, the meaning of the word 'Xerox' changed. More specifically, it gained a new meaning. For a long time, Xerox only referred to a company named in 1961. Some time in the late 60s, it started to be used as a verb, and as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the word 'Xerox' was overwhelmingly used in its verb form. [VIDEO] I don't think this dramatization (of a court proceedings from 2010) is related to Xerox's plight with losing their trademark, but said dramatization is brilliant nonetheless
I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good. What Is a Photocopier? [VIDEO]