-UK-based Guyanese publisher
‘We cannot steal to educate our children’
Guyanese-born publisher Arif Ali has launched a withering attack on the practice of copyright infringement in Guyana and has said that the onus is on government to take action to stamp out the practice.
“I have heard the arguments for the copying and sale of books, including school texts at prices below the published prices and I do not accept those arguments,” Ali told Stabroek Business in an exclusive interview earlier this week.
“I cannot understand how we can accept providing an education for our children based on a practice that amounts to no more than stealing from the very people whose books play a role in providing that education. There is no integrity or morality in that position,” Ali said.
“While we treat the copying and sale of published texts as a measure designed to provide cheap books, the fact of the matter is that it amounts to stealing and in many cases we are stealing from very ordinary people, writers who may have published one or two books at great sacrifice and who look forward to earning something for their effort. The other problem, of course, is that some of the copied books are of a decidedly poor quality. We cannot provide our children with sub-standard books and expect excellence from them, Ali added.
Ali told Stabroek Business that the lobby to bring an end to the pirating of text books should not be directed at the pirates themselves but at government. “If the government decides that there will be no copyright infringement the law of the land comes in and the offenders can be charged. It is definitely a government responsibility. We cannot steal to educate our children,” Ali added.
Local bookstores serving as agents for Caribbean and European publishers have continually protested the copying and sale of published texts, a practice which they say robs writers, publishers and booksellers of millions of dollars in earnings. Some local booksellers have said that government has made no real effort to stamp out the practice since the major players in the copying ‘industry’ are highly visible and can be easily detected.
Sources in the Ministry of Education have repeatedly told this newspaper that government’s reluctance to clamp down on the photocopying of school texts has to do with the high cost of original published copies.
But according to Ali “stealing from writers and publishers cannot be justified under any circumstance.”
The UK-based publisher told Stabroek Business that “there has to be other approaches to dealing with the problem.”
Meanwhile, according to Ali, books published by Hansib could soon become targets of pirates since initiatives are underway to have publications produced by the company introduced on the local curriculum.
He said that his own response to the copyright infringement challenge was likely to be to try to supply books at a cheaper cost in order to help response to “the affordability issue.” Ali said that if Hansib is able to secure a market for quantities of its own books comparable to the amounts that are being copied we will be able to provide those books at more affordable prices.
