The wholesale copying and resale of published school texts is one of the many distasteful facets of copyright infringement in Guyana today. The ‘pirates’ – as they have come to be known in Guyana – simply purchase single copies of the various texts from legitimate booksellers, reproduce these at a lower cost and then market them by various means – on pavements, in municipal markets and in many established stores – across the country.
Pirating is as lucrative as it is illegal. The books are cheaper than the published texts and therefore in great demand while the case for the fundamental wrongness of the practice is suppressed beneath the argument that pirating brings a measure of relief to the ‘poor parents.’
This, of course is an altogether hypocritical argument since the real beneficiaries are the pirates and their distributors who cart off millions of dollars in illegal gains while the losers are the authors, publishers and booksellers whose intellectual and material investments attract little if any returns.
The pirates are of course sufficiently well-known to allow for them to be prosecuted or simply put out of business should the authorities choose to do so except of course that the authorities have simply chosen to mostly look the other way.
Before he finally wound up his business late last year, Mr. Ovid Holder along with Mr. Lloyd Austin of Austin’s bookstore and other legitimate booksellers fought a prolonged but futile battle to bring an end to piracy. Their failure to rein in the pirates was due, primarily, to an official posture that is best described as dithering, one which politely suggested that the authorities did not support pirating but which reflects no real initiative to end the practice; in the meantime, a few officials of the Ministry of Education have quietly suggested that the authorities had no real solution to the problem of pirating since to stamp out the practice would mean to have to worry about a possible backlash resulting from the high cost of text books.
The unspoken suggestion that the end – cheaper books – somehow justifies the means – a thoroughly illegal racket – is really as far as this argument has gone and little is ever said about the losses accruing to the writers, publishers and booksellers arising out of their unrewarded intellectual and financial investment.
Earlier this week the Stabroek Business raised the issue of copyright transgression with Guyanese-born Mr Arif Ali, owner of Hansib, Europe’s largest black publishing company. He made some telling comments on the issue. First he rubbished the argument about access to cheaper books since, he argued, there can be no morality in a practice that actually steals other people’s intellectual property and robs them of gains to which they are entitled under the law. The practice, he said, should be seen for what it is, stealing – and he added bluntly, “we cannot steal to educate our children.”
And, Mr Ali says, the onus is really on the government to ensure that the law is upheld and that the writers, publishers and booksellers benefit from their investment by moving to eradicate the practice. “It is the government that must act to end the problem,” he said.
There can be no mistaking the correctness of Mr. Ali’s position. Indeed, this is the point that has been made by the booksellers time and again except of course that it has fallen on deaf ears.
While it is true that our existing copyright laws are badly in need of updating, they are, even in their existing state, more than adequate to tackle the piracy problem. It is purely a question of official will.
No one is, of course, unmindful of the high cost of text books and the strain that this cost places on ordinary Guyanese. But as Mr Ali says we must find ways of addressing this problem – and he says that his own company is prepared to be part of the search for solutions – that eschew a practice that amounts to no more than common theft.
