IT is commendable that as a way of marking World Intellectual Property Day on Friday, Karachi’s National Academy of the Performing Arts arranged for industry professionals to come together in a panel discussion on music piracy in Pakistan.

The issue has been raised many times by musicians, vocalists and all others who work in the industry. As the moderator of the discussion pointed out, the piracy levels of music are as high as 90pc in Pakistan, with hardly a legal impediment placed in the path of the pirates.

To those that produce the music, this means that once their work is in the public domain, they can expect to earn hardly anything at all in royalties — which in other countries usually constitutes the bread and butter of those producing the creative content.

Also read: ‘Get up, stand up… for music’

In addition, as a representative of the recording label EMI pointed out at Friday’s event, radio stations and television channels tend not to pay for the music they use; here, too, it seems that that those that produce the creative content are not shown the courtesy of being paid for their efforts.

The result is that music-makers are increasingly turning to markets in other countries for release, where the laws are better and enforcement stricter. Pakistan’s inefficiency is costing it an industry — and the revenue that would bring — that could be flourishing.

While this is an area that the country needs to work upon, it should be noted that the problems of piracy and the reluctance to pay artists royalties by even media houses is not restricted to the field of music. Private television production houses, for example, have for years suffered in the same way, at the cost of their own and their employees’ economic interests.

Media houses, for their part, complain legitimately about the unauthorised recording and pirating of their broadcasts. With all these industries capable of growing further and accumulating more cultural capital, it is time the laws and their enforcement were tightened considerably.

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2015

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