Delhi University Copyright dispute ignites IP debate in Indian Press

Robust defences of copyright and the principle of fair remuneration for rightholders are now emerging in the Indian press in the wake of the copyright dispute between Delhi University (DU) and three academic publishers (see earlier article), which had escalated with a student protest at the Delhi Book Fair and a Facebook page calling for a boycott of OUP, CUP and Taylor Francis titles.

Writing in The Hindu, Aakar Patel, takes the students to task and comments that “to malign these publishers for defending themselves against theft is unfair and unjust,” while Prashant Reddy of the Business Standard says that Indian students have to understand that academic books are the result of hard labour by publishers and authors. “Destroying the incentive to publish by bringing in wide exceptions to copyright law is only going to ensure few incentives for the publishing industry to invest resources in the Indian market,” he states, adding “that could only be bad news for the already beleaguered world of Indian academia.” Meanwhile on the blog Spicy IP, one contributor concludes that there is a solution at hand in the shape of the licenses already offered by the Indian Reprographic Rights Organisation (IRRO). Rather than going through litigation, he believes “DU would be better off with taking a licence from IRRO. It seems to be a fair price to pay for using books owned by these publishing houses and would ensure better royalty flows to the authors.”

IFRRO CEO, Olav Stokkmo, supports this long-term perspective on the benefits of copyright licensing in the academic sector. Pointing to the recent Price Waterhouse studies in the UK and Australia, detailing the contribution of copyright activities to the national economy and the fragile nature of educational publishing, Stokkmo asserts “broad copyright exceptions for educational uses, which do not recognise the need to reward authors and publishers, will result in fewer academic works published by fewer academic publishers. Neither universities nor their students will benefit in the long run from the evaporation of their sources of learning.”