Implementing Copyrights Law in Pakistan

Copyright protection in Pakistan is a major economic, political and diplomatic issue.

In Pakistan, where laws are hardly implemented, copyright infringement has always been a source of concern, and the country has been on the Special 301 Watch List since 1989.

Pakistan updated its copyright law with amendments in 1992. However, no significant progress against pervasive copyright piracy was made until 1994, when raids against video piracy began. The International Intellectual Property Alliance recommended last year that Pakistan remain on the Watch List, and United State Trade Representatives (USTR) agreed, while noting "greater efforts to combat copyright piracy" are required.

While I was skimming through articles on book piracy, I learned that Pakistan is one of the world’s worst markets for books, as piracy of published materials is rampant. Large-scale photocopy piracy and higher quality print piracy have completely decimated the market for most legitimate publishers. This is a worrisome state of affairs. The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) must devote resources and manpower to raid pirate printers and warehouses where pirated books are stored, and pirate retailers, especially those in the Karachi and Lahore Urdu Bazaars. The Ministry of Education must ensure that (International Intellectual Property Alliance 2007 Special 301: Pakistan Page 355) all books being used in educational institutions are legitimate copies.

Their is another study about Fix Royalty-Free Book Compulsory License that violates Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which tells that the government of Pakistan amended its copyright ordinance in 2000 to include Section 36(3) that allows a royalty-free compulsory license of books. This amendment was passed without any opportunity for publishers to comment. This provision threatens to further diminish a market already almost completely overrun by piracy. This royalty-free compulsory license violates the Berne Convention and TRIPS and the government of Pakistan should rather be working on to repeal it.

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, is an international agreement governing copyright, which was first accepted in Berne, Switzerland, in 1886.

Pakistan needs to understand the issues. Why do we have to care about copyrights? Who owns what? And later, formulate rules for using others' works (copyright compliance), guiding users about fair use, licensing rights and regulating them.

Pakistan also needs to implement a comprehensive copyright policy that provides basic guideline. This guidance should give in educational institutes; school, colleges and universities.

Guidance for faculty, students and staff could start from clarifying ownership issues, explaining fair use and other educational exemptions. Develop strategies to accommodate (for now) and reduce (for the future) and create a need to take permissions. To build a cyber infrastructure, transactional and subscription licensing, acquiring electronic access that covers predictable user needs, assessing the university's role in scholarly communication.

A thoughtful policy should made that is widely disseminated will go a long way towards establishing the good faith requisite to the most effective defenses available to universities under copyright law.

Also the growth in the internet usage has put further pressure on the authorities to curb its infringement. Some forms of information, when made accessible on the internet, are easily copied. Because the costs of copying are low and because copying is often anonymous, publishers have often responded with more aggressive enforcement of existing intellectual property rights and with calls for extensions of those rights to cover additional content, new media and new forms of access.

Copyright Issues Related to the Internet:

The technology of the Internet provides a new medium for dissemination of information, and this presents numerous challenges to traditional norms of copyright law. Most fundamentally, the internet provides means of nearly effortless and essentially perfect duplication and dissemination of works such as texts, pictures, audio-visual material, and other authorship for which copyright law provides certain exclusive rights to owners.

How New Media Entertainment Affect Your Life?

There are plenty of entertainment-based social networking platforms that could be related to. Like most of the teenagers, I too, keep track of favorite TV shows, latest music, on-the-chart movies and upcoming release of books through new media.  

Portals such as Foundd, Goodreads, Last.Fm, Bit Torrent and Rotten Tomatoes are just a few examples.

Working as a movie-recommendation engine that learns about your tastes, Foundd requires some time to set up. After rating a bunch of films, it allows you to see a tailored “Watch List” of the films you may like to watch. That’s how its algorithm predicts your selection pattern.

Foundd is another amazing portal. Through it, I can create a group list comprising up to five people. Foundd then suggests films according to the pattern of the hits on the content by that list.

But if you are an avid mover watcher, like me, and don’t want others’ influence to influence you, Foundd also gives you an option to just directly pick your next flick through the search engine.

For book readers, Goodreads is the king of social reading. I can share my progress as I work through a book; I can create a to-read list, and can moreover add ratings and reviews to books I’ve read.

It makes Goodreads a great place to connect with other readers or reading groups.

Goodreads allows me to keep track of my personal book collection by organizing books I’ve read, or want to read, into different collections, or ‘shelves’. Quite a fun in mingling with fellow book lovers and discuss latest literary releases.

What’s life without movies, books and music? With its integrated scrobbling feature, Last.fm can pull in details on the music I listen to with very little effort involved. I have a habit of looking back at my listening habits so this is really a great way to do it.

I can also get suggestions for new music, view my own listening data in a chart and connect with other people possessing similar taste for the genre.

And who in today’s world will want to watch a new without have read a preview or plot of it first? Though Pakistan still lacks in formal education for film critics, but things are pretty different in the Western parts of the world. Film-critics are as professionals as any filmmaker.

Rotten Tomatoes is a platform dedicated for such critics to submit their reviews on films. Originally designed for film lovers to visit the portal and check latest movies and read reviews on them from critics with authentic credibility, the Tomatoes help in developing a good understanding of films.

With films come torrents. Ethically I shouldn’t be advocating it as torrents encourage piracy which is a cyber-crime in many countries. But for those like me, with little budget, torrents are a blessing in disguise to fulfill our daily doses of film needs — without which, it’d be difficult for us to survive.

Does Technology Facilitates Religion in Today’s World?

Not just religion, technology has influenced everything in today’s world. It has become easier for preachers to use technology as a medium for communication.

As I’m not well versed on how preachers of Hinduism, Christianity or Zionism are utilizing technological advancements, so I’d prefer to focus on Islam alone.

I happen to come across Daneyal Sufi, a lecturer on cultural studies, and tried to know his insight on the subject. He believes that technology has been a blessing in disguise to communicate with large number of people in a relatively shorter period of time.

“There are (now) radio stations devoted to Quran’s recitation and translation. There is a wooden spreader on which the Quran is kept for recitation as it makes it higher so the necks don’t sprain,” he tells me.

Sufi had made a solid point, but as he is an accomplished academician, I expected this sort of a response from him. But my hunger to get a more detailed perspective led me to Osama Bin Azhar, an undergrad student pursuing computer science.

Osama preferred to link the technological advancements to the time approximately some 1,400 years ago. During the time of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), Osama tells me, the preachers preaching the religion had to go to different parts of the world on foot — which was a slow process.

With a revolution in communication industry, preaching has literally gone viral. Now we have Television and internet to communicate with millions in no time at all.

Osama’s input made me search on a bit of preaching organizations on the internet. I was amused to see a Facebook page with a massive following. Nauman Ali Khan uses social media to upload short videos and posts on religious topics to interact with his followers.

However, it is a famous saying that where there is good, there will always be bad. People say there are many those who mislead their followers using the very same medium. But look at it this way: medium is not the problem, it is the message.

For me, medium is like a knife. It can be used to commit a murder or to spread butter on a bread toast. It is a matter of one’s intentions.

Osama puts it aptly when he say, “Medium is only there to facilitate. It has nothing to do with leading or misleading towards the right path.”

I was pretty much satisfied with the information I had succeeded in obtaining, but I felt there was still something missing; a version from someone belonging to a totally opposite discipline. So, there I went to meet Yasir Siddiqui, who is a management executive in one of the city’s prominent software developing company.

Just a heads up, as Yasir’s take on the subject is going to be business-centric, which will be looking on the results the medium had achieved thus far.

“Social media has its own perks and challenges. Social media can be a facilitator to religion but in limited edition. It has given right to every Tom, Dick and Harry to speak up and share their voice, no matter how dangerous or obnoxious that voice would be,” he says.

Yasir believes that in order to learn or seek something “you first have to be loyal and sincere to your own self”, which helps a person in better understanding the message being delivered.

“But social media has taken away that very essence,” he adds.

For Yasir, most of the people on social media are less sincere towards them and have become “narcissistic” as they only tend to care about their opinion and do not respect disagreement.

How parents monitor their children in the age of social media?

It is more of a matter of “should” rather than ‘how’ parents monitor their children’s activities in the age of social media. Thankfully, I do not have any personal experience for this but asked a few children and parents about it.

A 12-year-old girl, Anam, tells me that when she is using Facebook her mother comes to her room and stands still in front of her, asking what she’s up to. “It’s really annoying,” she says.

There is a rule on Facebook that no one under the age of 13 is permitted to join it. However, there is no real way for Facebook to truly enforce it, because anyone can lie about their year of birth.

There is another family I asked this question, they were too afraid to reveal their names. They said, “Our kid uses internet around 12pm till 1pm, after that we monitor our kid’s internet history.”

This was a ‘Wow’ moment for me. I should have told them that there is an option to remove your entire internet history. So, I asked them if they had come across any inappropriate searching content. They replied in negative, saying: “There was just science and social studies content in search history.”  

I think they are too naïve as someone as young as that kid can’t possibly be searching such stuff at 12pm.  

Mind you, there are some intelligent parents too. They use Filtering Software. This software searches a child’s internet usage; many even enable to view the exact keys that were typed, time spent online and all computer activity.

I happen to come across one such family. “It allows us to monitor social media sites’ block chats, filter content and we can even monitor our child’s cell phone with a software program like this,” they told me.

And this was something truly unknown to me before I was enlightened about it. I couldn’t have ever imagined Pakistani parents of being able of going to such an extent. I guess we are really progressing.

It is wiser for some parents to install computer in a central location in their homes as it becomes easier for them to keep an eye out what the kid is up to. Setting down a limit of usage hours is not a bad idea at all.

Where many kids don’t seem to understand the complexities of the online world, it is a duty of their parents to guide them.