A senior Guyanese educator currently serving in the state school system has told Stabroek Business that some books delivered to schools by the Ministry of Education’s Book Distribution Unit (BDU) have included copied texts, which constitute a violation of the copyright law.
The educator said there was no question than that large numbers of copied texts had been delivered to various state schools by the BDU. Asked whether this meant that the Education Ministry was or had been complicit in the pirating of text books the official responded: “I am making no such accusation. I am simply telling you what the facts are.”
This is not the first occasion on which public pronouncements have been made which suggest that the Education Ministry has been doing much more than turning a blind eye to pirates whose replicating and marketing of school texts rob writers of royalties and deny overseas publishers and distributors millions of