R Jagannathan
Let’s be clear. No movie or book or intellectual property ever lost money just because a pirated version was available – either on the streets or on the Internet. What burns the IPR owners up is the possibility that someone else may be making money from their work, or that they could be making more if only the pirates were prevented from robbing their content. However, what they fail to consider is the possibility that it may be the pirate who is giving them the visibility that high pricing would not. Piracy is almost always the market’s response to overpricing or non-availability of a product. This is not about making a case for pirates, but to emphasise that IPR is an overvalued right in most cases. Barring a few exceptions, like drug companies who spend billions to discover one drug, the West tends to protect IPR too much. And now we have begun to do the same here. Take the Kolaveri Di song. It went viral because of the internet, but now we want to block others from accessing the "3" film through file-sharing sites. The true IPR content in Kolaveri Di is marginal. An average song became a hit for reasons other than its artistic merit. Sanskrit and Latin died out because their users protected their IPR and monopoly too much. The real law of property is this: use it or lose it. If you are going to be a stick-in-the-mud and protect you IPR like the crown jewels, you are going to lose it all.read less read more
Anant Rangaswami
Technology needs to catch up and protect the movie-makers. What they want is that their copyright-protected work is not pirated; it is not they who demand that entire file-sharing sites and portals are blocked. In another paradigm, copyright owners of books did not ask for all the printing presses to be shut down; they wanted those presses which printed pirated copies to be prevented from doing so. The collateral damage, in the current instance, is unfortunate, but what about the due and legal rights of those who own the copyright and the IPR and the considerable commercial losses to them?read less read more
