The government’s annual revenue losses from intellectual property rights’ infringements shot up to a staggering Rs 21 billion in 2008 as against Rs 10 billion loss in the year 2002, said Oxford University Press (OUP) in Pakistan Managing Director Ameena Saiyid.
She said this while speaking at a press conference organised to mark the ‘World Intellectual Property Day’ on Tuesday.
“The country’s legitimate industry, the government and the consumers are all suffering due to the rising piracy of books, software, entertainment material, and trademark violations,” said Saiyid.
Explaining her point of view, she said the tax-paying industry is losing billions of rupees because of counterfeiting and trademark violations by the unscrupulous businesses that violate these laws.
“The government is losing substantial revenues because the people who produce counterfeit and pirated products do not pay taxes, whereas, the consumers suffer because they are hoodwinked into buying pirated and counterfeited products,” said the OUP-Pakistan managing director.
Saiyid pointed out that with the help of law enforcement authorities, a number of people involved in producing low quality OUP course books – even in a greater quantity than the original books produced by OUP – have been arrested.
“Such books are published on inferior quality paper and contain many printing flaws including double printing of images while sometimes even the whole pages are missing. And the irony is that they are sold at the same price as the genuine OUP or other publishers’ books,” she maintained.
Saiyid added that leading writers, singers and software developers of the country are losing millions of rupees in royalty because the copiers do not pay anything to the creators.
“Imagine if an artist like Mehdi Hassan was paid his royalties, he would not have needed any support from the government or the public today,” she quipped.
Piracy, Saiyid observed, is an out-and-out theft as it is stolen from an author, inventor, musician, artist, singer or a filmmaker. “In Pakistan, it is the local companies and individuals who are the most affected by intellectual property rights infringements,” she added.
Saiyid underlined the importance for Pakistan to incorporate intellectual property rights in the constitution itself ‘because an economy cannot be built on any other basis.’
Urging the government to announce strict punishments for the people involved in piracy, violation of trademarks and patents, to discourage this flourishing trade, the OUP’s manager said that Intellectual Property Organisation should be made more effective and the courts should expedite the intellectual property rights cases.
