The Maverick Effect by Harish Mehta

Author:Harish Mehta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperBusiness
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

Copyright vs the Right to Copy

‘What is your problem with piracy?’ a career diplomat once chastised me. ‘Let Indians enjoy it. For centuries, the West has looted this country. Now, it is our turn to reap the fruits of their labour.’ This high-profile civil servant later entered politics, was elected to the Parliament and became a lawmaker.

You can easily imagine the attitude India has had towards intellectual property (IP) rights—be it copyrights, patents or trademarks.1 On the other hand, at NASSCOM, we were certain that if India failed to secure copyrights, the world would not recognize it as a business-friendly nation, serious about participating in globalization. This was particularly critical to the nascent IT industry’s growth in the late 1980s.

Nevertheless, when we tried to explain this to the government, the response had a simplistic refrain: ‘If the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are not copyrighted, why should anything else be?’ Even if made in jest, such remarks only revealed the magnitude of our problem. Let alone explaining the benefits of IP protection, we would have to begin by defining it first.

India’s intellectual property rights (IPR) mess affected all kinds of industries. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was common to buy a blank cassette and pay the neighbourhood record store for a mixtape. No one realized copyright was being violated, and they were stealing from the musicians they so adored. Movie theatres in smaller towns played pirated prints. These copies were shot off the screen, with a camera smuggled into a ticketed show. Some of these even got redistributed on VHS tapes and CDs. Most college campuses had photocopy shops selling pirated prints of textbooks, often only chapters relevant to the semester’s syllabus. Sharing a book’s pirated copy was as honoured as the noble act of ‘sharing knowledge’, instead of the theft that it was. (It’ll be ironic if you’re reading this on a shared PDF.)

The world over, piracy springs from unavailability or unaffordability. I believe, unlike other places, India has deeper reasons for disrespecting IPR. In my experience, Indians do not like to pay for the intangible. Things like advice from chartered accountants or lawyers are included in this list. Unless they make a brand for themselves, both professions were very poorly paid in India. Another intangible product, literature, suffered, too. Well into the twentieth century, Hindi writers were called munshi (clerk). This is because their creative effort was, in the minds of consumers, reduced to the simple, mechanical act of writing it all down, like a clerk would. Most writers were seen as merely recording existing oral knowledge. For thousands of years, knowledge-sharing in India has been collective, free and altruistic. Further, it has always been passed down to subsequent generations orally. The documentation of knowledge did not start happening till there were printing presses. Even revered teachers and saints like Shankaracharya did not charge any money for their parables. How was it then that we, as Indians, would pay our munshis? Naturally, piracy saw a spurt when this

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