Free speech and anti-piracy efforts were the main topics on the second day of the IPA Congress, which runs from March 24 to 26 in Bangkok.
For Hugo Zhang (Reed Elsevier China), partnerships that build on a key cultural aspect, “guanxi" (or relationship), is the way to win the piracy war in China. He shared the experience of founding an anti-piracy coalition of two companies (Elsevier and Springer) in 2010 that has since grown to 16 members. "Five years ago, a search on e-commerce site Alibaba would easily yield upwards of 5,000 illegal Elsevier items. But instead of fighting and suing the site – which may be too expensive and too time-consuming with little to show -- we become partners working together to weed out pirated content. Another e-commerce site, Baidu, heard about that, and we become partners too. Mind you, these partnerships are not perfect -- they never will be -- but we are making progress." Zhang advised the audience to think globally and act locally when it comes to fighting piracy. “Pick the real fight, think long term, and be patient. The battle is essentially about the 3Es: economics, enforcement and education.”
The anti-piracy process, to Geoff Taylor of BPI/BRIT Awards, is less of a battle and more of a campaign to win the hearts and minds of politicians and consumers, and is applicable to both music and book industries. "The key lies in understanding why pirating happens, and who are helping or benefiting from it. Then we can work out the strategies, such as protecting major markets through site blocking, getting search engines to de-rank illegal sites and promote legal ones, or disrupting the pirates’ business by seizing their domains. Global release day also discourages cross-border piracy of a product.” The focus, he concurred with Zhang, should be on partnership, and educating and creating awareness about piracy.
The Nigerian situation, presented by Lawrence Aladesuyi (Nigerian Publishers Association), was a grim reminder of the ongoing analog/hard goods piracy in different parts of the world. “The biggest challenges for us are book scarcity, which in a way promotes piracy; corruption issues; and uncooperative attitudes of some countries in helping to combat the problem.” Aladesuyi’s challenges were familiar to panel chair, Buenos Aires-based Ana Maria Cabanellas (Editorial Heliasta). Clear copyright legislation, she added, “is needed to defend authors. We need more effective book distribution networks, more libraries, lower taxes on books, and stronger industry associations to defend copyright -- and these are especially true in the Latin America context.”
While the piracy situation is improving through partnerships and governmental intervention, freedom of speech -- for some countries, especially -- is moving in the other direction. The second panel, chaired by Ola Wallin, who heads the IPA Freedom to Publish Committee, delivered disheartening censorship scenarios in Thailand, China and Russia. In most cases, censorship is done in the interest of “national security”.
Trasvin Jittidecharak (Silkworm Books), for instance, was critical of Thailand’s "lese majeste" law that cracks down on content that is deemed to insult the monarchy -- specifically the king, queen and crown prince -- even in an oblique way through fictitious works. The maximum jail sentence of seven years has given rise to self-censorship. Then there are the 2007 and 2011 Computer Crime Acts, which are based on national security perspective and ambiguously worded. “Things are changing very fast, and there is no guarantee of information security or citizen privacy. So let me sum up the current situation this way: Do Thais have freedom to publish? No, we do not. Are we comfortable with it? No. Are we fighting it? Yes, we are; subtly, of course, since we are now under military rule. But everyone is fighting in his or her own way.” To this, Wallin, representing the IPA, asked the Thai government to free its book market from any type of censorship.
Fellow panelist, dissident poet Bei Ling, on the other hand, was critical of the ways the Chinese government controls the publishing industry. “ISBNs are only given to state-owned publishing houses, which produce about 90% of the country’s titles. Independent publishers, contributing less than 10% of the titles, have to ‘buy’ ISBNs from these houses if they want to publish the titles. Then there are self-published or ‘underground’ publishers, which are not allowed to put a price on their book. The printers working with such ‘underground’ publishers may risk being heftily fined if caught, and so they rigorously censor the content to play it safe.” For Bei, who was deported to the U.S. after being charged for “illegal publishing” (of a literary magazine) in 2000, government censorship and self-censorship are an affront to freedom of speech and freedom to publish.
As for Irina Prokhorova (New Literary Observer), she admitted that she would not have thought that she would be talking about freedom of speech in Russia if anyone had asked her a year ago. “The changes are very dramatic, and there is basically no freedom of speech in the media. In fact, local media coverage of Russia and its leaders has a mythological feel to it. The book market, while still independent, is experiencing tremendous pressures. But the Russian society is very creative, and the new technologies are our friends in disseminating knowledge and information. As for now, what we need from the world community is solidarity and sympathy.” The declaration of 2015 as the Year of Literature and the decision to hold the upcoming 10th Moscow Open Book Festival in Red Square (“an ideologically loaded location”) are, in her words, “suspicious, because contemporary Russian literature is provocative and experimental, and nostalgia has little to do with it.”
