Pirates of
New Delhi
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (NOVEMBER 2001)
Talk
of international piracy may make some American publishers
nod off at the conference table, but at a forum held
in Frankfurt last month, the Indian anti-piracy daredevil
Akash Chittranshi told tales that had even the
most narcoleptic among us wide-eyed with suspense. An
intellectual property lawyer based in New Delhi by day
— and apparently an avid reader of cloak-and-dagger
novels by night — Chittranshi has helped pull off nine
daring raids on 40 different pirate publishers in India,
rounding up 70,000 copies of pirated books to date.
One of the most celebrated Indian missions, reports
PT’s correspondent, came last July, when a phalanx
of 22 cops and 11 investigators swooped down on a Delhi
warehouse after Chittranshi’s spies, posing as manual
laborers, confirmed the whereabouts of a major pirate
operation. The intricate 45-hour bust turned up scores
of volumes from Grisham, Ludlum, and J.K.
Rowling, and ended up being the biggest pirate haul
in India’s history — more than 27,000 copies.
Unfortunately, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when
it comes to copyright piracy, which AAP estimates
put at an $8 billion loss last year for American publishers.
For its part, the AAP hiked funding this year more than
100 percent to battle international copyright piracy.
The $400,000 is hoped to bolster efforts such as those
in India, which have also been aided by the British
Publishers’ Association and the Indian Association
of Publishers. Piracy experts note that even modest
busts can be of paramount importance to medical and
scientific publishers, as a hefty $300 engineering textbook
can be pirated and sold for a fraction of the price.
Moreover, sources say that in India, education programs
have paid off: 90% of booksellers there now refuse to
stock pirated copies. On the other hand, rogue traders
still blithely take orders for illegal editions at open
markets around New Delhi, and the police force has only
a few officers to track what is said to be a sophisticated
network of offenders.
In nearby Pakistan, half of the book market reportedly
consists of pirated material, much of which is thought
to find its way into Indian hands. And in Malaysia,
copy shops happily take orders from schools, delivering
photocopied texts to classrooms. But there’s hope. In
Singapore, a new police division is targeting bulk photocopying,
and last February, Korean agents nabbed 600,000 counterfeit
English-language books worth $14.5 million. About 2,000
titles of bestsellers, textbooks, and other works were
seized in a warehouse belonging to venerable distributor
Han Shin. As officials complained, foreign publishers
aren’t the only ones feeling the pain: “Korean students
have been paying [the] full imported book retail price
for Han Shin’s shoddy counterfeits.”
©2001
Publishing Trends
