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.
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