Piracy- part II

Here goes the research I did on book piracy in Pakistan:

Book Piracy and Copyright Laws in Pakistan

Copy-right Laws

The Copyright Ordinance of 1962 came into force in 1967 in Pakistan and has been in effect since then. A number of conditions are given in the ordinance which determines when a work is in violation of copyright.

Pakistan is also a member of Berne Convention on copyright as well as the Universal Copyright Convention.

The boom in the education industry created a vast market for text books, both for primary and professional levels. Where the primary sector is largely catered to by the local text book boards, there is a serious dearth for books on professional subjects like medical, engineering or business. Thus increased the demand for foreign books. Due to import limitations the prices of these books were totally out of reach of an average Pakistani student. The National Book Foundation was set up to reprint and translate foreign titles with the permission of the original publisher. This was to make the prices affordable and within reach. But even this effort was not as successful as hoped because most of the reprinted titles were either obsolete or were very old editions.

The grave vacuum in the industry was sensed by the pirates and so began a very successful industry of pirated books. Almost all major tiles were reprinted illegally and were sold at a fraction of the original price. Not only were text books pirated but the recent years have seen a number of local and international fiction works being pirated even before the release of original tiles in paper back.

The release of the Harry Potter books can be taken as a classic example of this case. The book was all set to be released on 12^th of August and there was a huge hype surrounding its release. Almost all major book stores throughout the world had millions of books booked prior to the release. Even in Pakistan, a couple of leading bookstores were providing the facility of pre-ordering the book and getting a nominal discount. The price of the book was 1450 Pak rupees. But what do the pirates offer? The pirated version was in market the very next morning on a shameful price of 300 Pak rupees! A huge difference of 1150 rupees between the prices! Of course people didn’t consider it to be a bad bargain.

The trend of illegally reproducing books is not limited to international bestsellers. Usually one doesn’t find the pirated version of books by Pakistani authors so easily but there is a market for such books as well. Tehmina Durrani’s My Feudal Lord, Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat, are only but two examples.

When asked about the situation, Bapsi Sidhwa, a leading Pakistani English prose writer, says “Piracy is a problem because of the steep prices. However some pirates are developing a conscience and assigning my previously pirated books to publishers. They have made a packet off me, but so long as books are read, I don't mind as much as I should. If we have more publishers and a larger reading public, the prices could be better controlled.”

There have been numerous raids in the past and recently too at Urdu Bazaar for selling pirated books but all that is merely just a show and nothing has yet been done to seriously think of a solution. The piracy industry is deeply rooted and cannot be curbed with a few raids on shops which don’t even print those books