The Tale of Captain Bookbeard: an Account of Book Piracy
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The Tale of Captain BookBeard: An account of Book Piracy
A bibliophilic stroll in the streets and lanes of Kolkata is bound to get across the cries of Captain BookBeard coming from the Sea of Poppies1, The Sea of Monsters2 and The Ship of Stars3, and as one starts to wonder about the whereabouts of this ever present, as almost in every pavementbookstalls, yet elusive pirate lord, a tale starts to emerge as the tip of a stealthy ice-berg which dwells in the heart of the world of letters. Book piracy, a comparatively unknown and unfelt form of socio-economic cancer, is the common disease of every nation. But its effect is visible mostly in the developing ones, where the lack of proper implementation of law, huge disparityridden economy, rise in literacy rate and the growing cosmopolitan literary taste creates a perfect biome for the broadsides of pirate-ships to devastate the publishing houses and book-sellers selling un-pirated copies.
No right to copy!
Innovations require incentives - this is the basic idea behind the idea of ‘copyright’ that protects a writer’s work from being copied, printed and distributed without his/her prior permission, through legal sanction. Book piracy comes under the broader spectrum of ‘copyright infringement’ which includes such creative fields like songs, films, software, etc. Though, it had existed from the end of the 15th century, when competing printers started to use unfair practices, thus far before anything even close to a copyright law has been adopted anywhere. Britain was the first nation to legally designate the issue of protecting the right over one’s own creativity, and in 1709 through the Statute of Anne (enforced on the next year) in Great Britain, the authors got some protection as far production of reprints of their works was concerned and through the gradual evolution in the successive years like Engravers Act of 1735 and Copyright
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Fiction/novel by Amitabh Ghosh Fiction/novel by Rick Riordan 3
The Tale of Captain BookBeard: An account of Book Piracy
A bibliophilic stroll in the streets and lanes of Kolkata is bound to get across the cries of Captain BookBeard coming from the Sea of Poppies1, The Sea of Monsters2 and The Ship of Stars3, and as one starts to wonder about the whereabouts of this ever present, as almost in every pavementbookstalls, yet elusive pirate lord, a tale starts to emerge as the tip of a stealthy ice-berg which dwells in the heart of the world of letters. Book piracy, a comparatively unknown and unfelt form of socio-economic cancer, is the common disease of every nation. But its effect is visible mostly in the developing ones, where the lack of proper implementation of law, huge disparityridden economy, rise in literacy rate and the growing cosmopolitan literary taste creates a perfect biome for the broadsides of pirate-ships to devastate the publishing houses and book-sellers selling un-pirated copies.
No right to copy!
Innovations require incentives - this is the basic idea behind the idea of ‘copyright’ that protects a writer’s work from being copied, printed and distributed without his/her prior permission, through legal sanction. Book piracy comes under the broader spectrum of ‘copyright infringement’ which includes such creative fields like songs, films, software, etc. Though, it had existed from the end of the 15th century, when competing printers started to use unfair practices, thus far before anything even close to a copyright law has been adopted anywhere. Britain was the first nation to legally designate the issue of protecting the right over one’s own creativity, and in 1709 through the Statute of Anne (enforced on the next year) in Great Britain, the authors got some protection as far production of reprints of their works was concerned and through the gradual evolution in the successive years like Engravers Act of 1735 and Copyright
1 2
Fiction/novel by Amitabh Ghosh Fiction/novel by Rick Riordan 3