Financial Times

Book pirates slowly creep into Sri Lankan publishing industry
By Feizal Samath
Having helped police seize thousands of counterfeit books and arrest dozens of bogus publishers, India's premier book pirate buster is now tracking another culprit in the business - the online trader. Akash Chittranshi is also criss-crossing the region urging publishers and law enforcement authorities to hit hard against piracy before it swallows the industry.

"You may have what you see as a small problem. But if it grows - it become a disease you won't be able to stop," the young but famed 38-year old lawyer, told a group of Sri Lankan publishers, booksellers and journalists last week.

Chittranshi, labelled Mr Copyright by the Indian media for his path-breaking efforts, has in four years of intensive work as an intellectual property lawyer for top British and American publishers including Bloomsbury - publisher of the Harry Potter series - investigated 568 businesses leading to 231 raids, 217 arrests and the seizure of nearly half a million counterfeit copies of bestsellers.

When J.K. Rowling's Order of the Phoenix was ready for release, Chittranshi's investigators placed India's top five pirates under surveillance for four weeks - two before the launch and two after that.

Result? Bloomsbury sold about 100,000 copies of the book, one of the biggest ever sales during a Harry Potter launch. The Indian lawyer said the four weeks of intense surveillance made it difficult for book pirates to publish fake copies and sell it.

"Book pirates always go for best sellers. No one wants books that don't sell," he noted in an interview with The Sunday Times FT. The period immediately before and after the release of a best seller is when the pirates get activated because of public interest in a book.

His inspiring work across the Palk Strait has resulted in the Sri Lankan publishing industry taking serious note of piracy. "This is a serious problem. If we don't tackle it head on ... we'll all go down under," warned Vijitha Yapa, one of Colombo's top publishers and bookseller waving two identical copies of a Longmans book.

"Can you recognise the original and the counterfeit copy?" he asked at a book piracy seminar in Colombo that coincided with the Colombo Book Fair. At one of the stalls, the local agents for Staedler - a respected German eraser widely used in Sri Lanka - showed The Sunday Times FT two identical versions of the eraser. "We have found the fake product being sold in bookshops along with the original," a spokesperson for the agent said. The company took out several advertisements in local newspapers last week warning the public to beware of imitation erasers and to report such instances.

Counterfeit books are a much cheaper version of the originals and find a ready market in countries in South Asia where a majority of the population is poor. West Africa is also a popular location for piracy where millions of counterfeit editions of popular textbook are smuggled in from countries as far as India, experts say.

According to Chittranshi, Asia is seen as the biggest market for piracy particularly China. The total worth of the piracy industry in Asia is over a billion dollars with the biggest CD manufacturing units located in China and now emerging in India. Earlier this month Sri Lankan police raided a popular CD store and arrested its owner for making and selling counterfeit copies of popular Sinhalese-language movies. It was one of the biggest raids here.

Sri Lanka, still in the infant stage of awareness about book piracy and counterfeit of stationary, is stepping up the protection of intellectual property, introducing wide-ranging laws in 2003.

D.M. Karunaratne, Director-General of Sri Lanka's National Intellectual Property Office, said creativity is adequately protected with stiff penalties against violators. Protection covers writings, books, lectures, music, art or any form of creative work.

But he acknowledges that Internet - like many others have found - is a difficult medium to control. "What do you do if someone downloads 10,000 copies of a particular book or piece of work?" Under local laws copyrights violators can be slapped a fine of up to one million rupees and/or jailed for two years.

Since litigation is a costly and time-consuming process in Sri Lanka, Karunaratne is setting up a dispute-resolution mechanism where the two parties - the victim and the culprit - negotiate an amicable settlement. Other plans to tackle piracy include setting up a 24-hour hotline at Karunaratne's office with a direct link to the police to act when a complaint is made.

Chittranshi praises the new laws and Sri Lanka's resolve in handling this issue but doesn't agree with the civil justice process. "These are crooks, criminals. What they do is a crime. Stealing one's creativity should be considered a serious crime," the Indian lawyer, whose investigators have been beaten and suffered broken legs in the course of investigations, said.

He says there are lots of risks involved in this business while a lot of secrecy has to be maintained in the entire investigation. "There are times you wonder whether there are moles in your team. Then you worry about your children," Chittranshi said explaining how his brand new, week-old car was once smashed outside his New Delhi home while the family was asleep.

But he loves the risks that go with the job. "I am a very righteous person by nature and a very religious person. I meditate a lot. I believe that the more I do, the more the Lord will make sure I am protected."

When Chittranshi addressed a seminar on book piracy organised by the UK Publishers Association on the sidelines of an international book fair in New Delhi in 2000, no one took him seriously.

"They thought this is a big joke. Today I have credibility. Everybody believes in me. Many of the publishers who thought this was a big joke are now constantly asking for my help," he said.

Chittranshi, who has his own law firm and is a widely acknowledged global expert in intellectual property, says his first job at a law firm where he serviced Microsoft as one of the firm’s clients in dealing with software piracy has helped his current efforts. In his current work to track down online violators, the Indian lawyer also acts for famous clients like Cartier, Mont Blanc, Dunhill and Piaget. "Police use to tell me why go after software crooks when we have more heinous crimes to attend to. I was told why bother about multinationals whose interest is only making money Today these same people say if this (campaign) hadn't been done, we wouldn't be having such a vibrant software and book publishing industry in India," he added.

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