-affected publishers gearing for court action
Education Minister Shaik Baksh is yet to make public the outcome of his promise to “find out” whether his Ministry may be complicit in supporting the multi-million dollar textbook piracy industry.
Several weeks ago, Baksh was quoted in a section of the media as undertaking to “find out” whether the Ministry may have awarded contracts to persons involved in the piracy business to replicate books published by overseas publishers for distribution to state schools, thereby meeting government’s free textbook policy for public school students. The issue arose after local bookseller and publishers’ representative Lloyd Austin said that a local teacher had informed him of the delivery of a consignment of copied textbooks to a local school and this included a number of copies of books published by the overseas-based publishers Oxford and Nelson-Thorne, among others.
Baksh was reported as saying at the time that he was unaware of whether or not the allegation might be true but that he would “find out.”
Since the disclosure, a letter written by a named writer, purporting to be a teacher at a named school, has appeared in a section of the media asserting that a quantity of books, including replicated texts published by overseas-based publishers, had been delivered to the school in question. According to the letter, the copies of the texts published by overseas-based publishers did not bear the customary Ministry of Education stamp usually affixed to books distributed to schools by the Ministry.
Austin told Stabroek Business that if the allegation is true, the absence of the stamp may have been deliberate; an attempt, he suggested, to distance the Ministry of Education from the illegality of copying the texts.
Earlier this week, Stabroek Business sought to follow-up on the promise reportedly made by Minister Baksh to “follow up” on the allegation. Following two telephone calls to his office, we were advised to make contact with the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary Phulander Khandai. Subsequent communication with the Permanent Secretary’s office have borne no fruit, since, on each occasion, we were advised that the Permanent Secretary was unavailable. Stabroek News is also yet to receive a response to a letter on the issue published in the Tuesday August 8 issue of the newspaper, which was sent to the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary for comment some weeks ago.
While publishers’ local representatives and booksellers have made little headway in seeking to bring an end to the practice of textbook piracy, Stabroek Business has been informed that a group of overseas publishers have secured the services of a local attorney in an attempt to secure an injunction to cease the reproduction of the textbooks by a known transgressor. This newspaper understands that the injunction, which was to have been filed in August, also seeks to stop the sale of the copied books by a few named retailers in the city. Austin told Stabroek Business that the process may have been delayed on account of the need to gather evidence to support the legal move including receipts and invoices issued by booksellers.
This newspaper has seen an e-mail from another local publishers’ representative advocating “a three-pronged” approach to tackling the problem of text book pirating. That includes the active lobbying of the United States Embassy and the British High Commission in Guyana to help put pressure on the local authorities to become more active in seeking to bring an end to the practice. According to the local publishers’ representative, while local piracy targets mostly British publishers, American- published literature is widely infringed at the University of Guyana. The communication also recommends “collaboration among the ABC countries (America, Britain and Canada)” aimed at ensuring, first, “that the Government of Guyana operate within defined parameters” and secondly that the interests of publishers from those countries are protected.
Austin, who told Stabroek Business that in recent times there had been a higher level of collaboration between local booksellers and overseas publishers in an effort to tackle the problem, conceded that the argument that piracy afforded the availability of cheaper textbooks had impacted negatively on efforts to bring the practice to an end. Austin asserted, however, that textbook prices in Guyana were cheaper in other parts of the Caribbean, where the same texts were being used in the school system. He said that by allowing ourselves to be “taken in” by the argument about cheap textbooks, Guyana was being led to believe that the pirates were providing a service. “These people do not care about providing a service. Their only concern is with using an illegal means to make money,” Austin added.
