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ABOUT THE STUDY

After the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade (GATT), which led to the establishment of World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995, the issues relating to protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) are assuming increasing importance world wide. India is witnessing a live debate on the pros and cons of the outcomes of the Uruguay Round, especially in the case of IPRs. But gradually there has been a attitudinal shift towards exploiting the avenues opened up by the new international trade regime from the pedagogic discussions on the subject. Copyright constitutes an important part of the wider concept of intellectual property rights. Although the concept of copyright has been in existence in the country for long, there is now a sense of urgency to sort out matters connected with it. This may be due to the realisation that in the post WTO scenario, apart from its socio-cultural importance, copyright is likely to be a factor to reckon with in the economic front as well.

Given its rich cultural heritage,India had always remained a powerful force in the field of copyright. The  activities that come under the subject of copyright are largely prevalent in the country and they are growing. India is counted among the top seven publishing nations of the world with a sizeable portion of her publications being in English.  It constitutes the largest market for audio cassettes and films produced in the country  exceed 600 per annum. India has a huge potential in the field of computer software. The software industry has been  growing at an amazing rate of above 50% for consecutive years since the beginning of the current decade.

On the legislation front, copyright laws in India are comparable to those of many developed countries. In order to keep a pace with the contemporary technological developments, India's copyright legislation had been amended from time to time, e.g. in 1983, 1984 and 1994, since its commencement in 1958. The punishments for copyright violations had been made progressively more stringent. The present law is also almost in full conformity with the Uruguay Round Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs).  In spite of all these, awareness on copyright is rather poor in the country and piracy is believed to be wide spread.
 

Worldwide it is recognized that copyright piracy is a serious crime which not only adversely affects the creative potential of the society  by denying the creators their legitimate dues, it also causes economic losses to all those who had invested their money in bringing out copyrighted materials in various forms for use by end-users. Globalization forced the copyright issues to the forefront because a large number of copyrighted products are traded internationally. Protection of copyright, therefore, is a priority matter with in the national agenda of many countries especially from the developing world. Surely, it also has emerged as an important factor governing international relations.
 

In developed countries, the copyright based industries comprising mainly  the print & publishing industry, audio cassettes/CDs industry, film and video industry and computer softwares etc. contribute handsomely to the state exchequers. Results from past studies indicated that in some of these nations (e.g. USA, Germany, Sweden, Australia, U.K.) the contribution from copyright based industries to their respective Gross  Domestic Product (GDP) is significantly high. Unfortunately in the Indian context no systematic effort is undertaken to arrive at fair indicators of the sector's contribution to GDP, even though it is believed that copyright industry has a place of importance in the economic arena of the country. By the same token, there is no reliable estimates to give an account of the losses arising out of copyright piracy. The claims on the extent of piracy and corresponding losses made by various stake holders of the copyright industry are also found to be  too general and at times exaggerated and conflicting with each other.
 

In this background the Ministry of HRD, Government of India, which is an apex body in the country in copyright matters, initiated a comprehensive study to know the ground level realities of the copyright piracy phenomenon. The study which is the first of its kind was assigned to the National Productivity Council with the following objectives :-

1. Assessing the extent of copyright piracy prevailing inv arious segments of the copyright industry namely cinematographic works including video, sound recordings, computer software, literary works and the performers.

2. Assessing the impact of piracy on copyright holder and the national economy.

3. Evolving a phased programme for tackling the situation by improving the enforcement of the Copyright Act as well as to promote schemes of awareness creation. 

1. The study being undertaken for the first time in India suffers from certain disadvantages. The greatest handicap perhaps arises from the information requirements. The study, to begin with, did not have the basic information on the Indian copyright industry itself. One reason for this is the dominance of unorganised sectors in various segments of the industry. As a result, precise data on investment, production, demand - domestic as well as overseas- and the like are not available. Even in the case of the organised sectors, the data base is far too inadequate, except perhaps in case of computer software. In some of the industry segments, information on physical dimensions (e.g. number of publishers and the number of titles published annually in case of the book publishing industry) are available. But to translate these into monetary values like the industry turnover becomes extremely difficult due to vast variations in the industry practices among the players of the industry. 

    2.   Given the above limitations, we approached the study by seeking information from various stake holders of the copyright            industry.Firstly, the channel through which the copyrighted materials flow from its origin (i.e. the creators) to the places of            final        use was identified. Attempts were made to extract information on various aspects of copyright matters form the main            pillars of this            channel. Information was also sought from apex industry associations, copyright enforcement authority and            the experts from the field

   3.   Discussions with the apex level organisations and associations including those registered as copyright societies(List in & Annexure             1) 

   4.   Discussions with the copyright holders such as right holders, software companies, music producers etc.

   5.   Discussions with the copyright holders such as book publishers, film producers including video and cable right holders,software           companies, music producers etc.

   6.   Five different sets of questionnaires were developed covering copyright enforcement authority at the State\UT level, copyright industry           associations,rightholders, distributors\sellers of copyrighted products and the end users of copyright work, at individual as well as           organisational levels (Annexure 2). The target groups are chosen from among those who are either producers,  distributors  or end-          users of copyrighted items.  The enforcement authorities are also contacted for gathering information on copyright violations and the           difficulties faced by them in enforcement of laws at the State \UT level.

   7.  Selection of samples for the study was a tedious task.  This is because of the fact that a suitable sample frame was not available for          some of the copyright industry segments. Secondly, given the large size of the population in certain target groups, determining an          appropriate sample size, which would truly represent the group, was difficult. Therefore, the sample size in each copyright industry          segment was decided by striking a balance between the number of players (e.g. manufacturers, suppliers) involved in the segment          and the time cost involved in conducting the field survey. Based on these considerations, it was decided to interview about          100 rightholders and 150 sellers from each copyright segment. This number, however, was reduced  in the case of music          companies,software producers and film producers including video film producers from the rightholders category and authorised          distributors of video cassettes from the sellers category, because of the fact that the proposed sample is too high in relation to the          total number of players in the respective segments. As per the list available with the Indian Music Industry(IMI) , the association of          leading music companies in the country, there are about 50 large manufacturers of audio products in India commanding more than          ninety percent of the total production. In this segment, therefore, we restricted the sample size to 30 only. Similarly, in the software          segment the sample includes 5 large software producers whose products capture a major part of Indian software market and are          supposed to be the target of the pirates.

   8.  Selecting sample endusers was more complex as copyrighted products are used in varying intensities by almost all the urban           households.Even one per cent sample would be beyond the scope of the present study.Therefore, as a thumb rule we decided to          interview 120 endusers in each of the copyright segment. Regarding selection of respondents, the procedure varied from stratified          and purposive sampling depending upon the target group nature to ad-hoc selection based on the availability of respondents. For          example, in case of endusers (individuals) samples were selected from the places of  purchase and/or final use of copyrighted          products such as shops, libraries, households, etc.  In the rightholders and sellers/distributors category, the larger ones were          preferred to their smaller counterparts based on the consideration that they may be maintaining data in a better manner.                               The distribution of sample units over the survey locations was done based on the concentration of production activities  in   that                     location. For example, the number of sample rightholders and sellers related to cinematographic works and sound recordings are         more from Mumbai as majority of the production activities in these segments take place there. However, in the case of endusers, the         total sample respondents are evenly distributed over all six survey locations based on the consideration that the purchase of         copyrighted products could be expected to take place almost uniformly among the selected cities chosen for survey.

   9.  Canvassing of questionnaires took place in six major cities of India namely Mumbai, Calcutta, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and           Hyderabad.  Even though copyrighted products are produced and used all over the country, the intensity of use and  therefore the tendency towards copyright violations is generally concentrated in urban centres compared to their rural counterparts.  Therefore, we selected the six major urban centres mentioned above for conducting the field level survey. In any case, an extensive coverage of all the urban and rural locations is beyond the scope of the study, because of time and cost constraints.

  10.  Field survey was undertaken during June - August 1997. The survey covered all the target groups mentioned earlier.  In most of the cases personal contacts were established with the sample respondents by the NPC consultants and \or field investigators.  In some cases where the final consumers (e.g. organisations such as software users, hotels ) are spread far and wide in the country, questionnaires were mailed to the target respondents.  Thus, structured questionnaires were mailed to about 2000  users (organisations) of computer softwares and about 300 hotels (3 star and above).  The hotels were contacted personally also seeking information on copyright violations relating to cinematographic works and sound recordings.  Besides these, the copyright enforcement cells (crime branches) of all the States and UT’s were contacted through mailed questionnaires. But responses were received from only 13 states/UTs.

  11. The overall response  from the field survey was satisfactory.  Against the target number of 1420, we received responses from 1329 sample respondents.  The success rate is about 94 %.  In the case of music companies, however, the response has been rather poor.  We could receive only 14 filled in questionnaire in this category against a target of 30. The city wise response rate is the highest in Chennai 107%) followed by Hyderabad (105 %) and Bangalore (95%).  The detailed break up of responses received against the target numbers is presented in Table1.  

12. Some international agencies like WIPO, were also contacted to know about the extent of piracy in various segments and         methodologies adopted to arrive at the same. The list of such agencies is given in Annexure 3.However,only few of them responded to our queries.    

Limitations 

The present study, being the first of its kind in India, suffers from certain limitations. The first and the foremost is the non-availability of any reliable database on the country's copyright industries. The study had the handicap of starting from almost a zero base in this respect, except to some extent in segments like computer software and sound recordings. The attempt to gather information from alternative sources mainly through questionnaire survey also did not meet with the desired success.  Even though the overall response from the field survey was 94 per cent, quite a large number of filled-in questionnaires did not mention of crucial information like investment, production, sales etc., which were required to estimate market size as well as extent of piracy. Besides,  some of the rightholder groups notably the music companies and a number of copyright industry associations such as the IMI, Film Federation of India etc. did not return us the filled-in questionnaires in spite of several visits being made to their premises by NPC consultants and/or the field investigators.  Apart from being non co-operative, some of the respondents in the field survey particularly the sellers of audio/video products, turned hostile to the study team based on the suspicion that the information shared would be passed on to other government machinery  e.g. the sales tax department and the police. .The non availability of sample frame in the case of some of the copyright segments made the sampling task complex. The resultant estimates derived from the analysis of the responses could be treated as indicative of the magnitude of the piracy phenomenon rather than a true representation of the reality, in the case of some of the copyright segments. More details of the limitations of the study are mentioned in the sections dealing with specific copyright segments.

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