How would you feel if you invest your time and energy, not to speak of money, in a project and someone else pockets your returns? That is what a publisher experiences when his book is pirated and remorselessly sold in the market. Another victim is the author who is deprived of his royalty.

Piracy is rampant in this country because the copyright laws are vague and hardly implemented. Maximum penalty has been specified but minimum penalty is not spelt out, with the result that after paying a small amount (Rs1,000 or Rs2,000), a pirate returns home merrily.

The proprietor of Karachi-based Maktaba-e-Danyal ruefully recalls that when a certain title of Mushtaq Yusufi went out of print for a short while, a book trader imported a sizeable number of copies of the pirated Indian edition. What is worse, after the stocks were exhausted, the devil’s disciple printed strikingly similar copies. Legal action was subsequently taken against him. His stocks were confiscated and burnt, and the culprit was released after paying a petty amount as fine.

Piracy is rampant in this country because the copyright laws are vague and hardly implemented

Afzaal Ahmed, the owner of Sang-e-Meel, which publishes about a hundred titles a year, replies to this writer’s message, with an air of resignation, “It is very difficult to stop this practice.”

The trouble is that the police don’t understand the gravity of the situation. They are unable to understand that piracy is a kind of theft, rather burglary.

Replying to the question “Is this crime only prevalent in the field of textbooks?” Ameena Saiyid, MD of OUP (Oxford University Press), says “True, textbooks are worst affected but piracy afflicts all fast selling books. Mohsin Hamid’s bestselling novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is an example.”

Iqbal Salehmohammed of Paramount, who has published as many as 80 medical textbooks, has a different story to tell. “We price our books as low as possible and don’t keep any profit margin in the first edition. It is in the subsequent editions that we make modest profits. The pirates cannot match the quality of our books, since there are a number of colour pictures. If they ever try to do it they’ll make no money.”

“With Pakistani doctors authoring your books, there is always the danger of plagiarising parts from foreign books,” is the next question.

“We have imported expensive software which takes care of that. Every year we have to get it renewed.

Back to piracy, I speak to Ashok Chopra, the CEO of Hay House, India, who draws a grimmer picture of the menace in India. He says that in Delhi, for example, at every crossing you find people selling pirated books of popular writers like Shobhaa De and Chetan Anand. This is in spite of the fact that raids are occasionally made by the police and illegally published books are confiscated. The losses to legitimate publishers is in terms of millions.

The predicament seems less intense in Pakistan. But if you ask me why, I’ll tell you “It is only because our people are much less into reading.” —AN

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, February 7th, 2016