Second innings

Most Indian publishers remain blissfully innocent of copyright laws, which seek to protect the intellectual property rights of authors. All they seem to know, if at all, is that copyright tends to lapse 50 years after the author’s death, after which the book could come into public domain. Any publisher could then legitimately publish it under its own imprint.

But it isn’t as simple as that. For two reasons. First, copyright could be extended by the author’s assigns, or the text could be revised for another lease of life. Second, print technology and the internet have changed the rules of the game.

No publisher wants to let go of the rights of a steady seller, simply because it is the backlist in which investment has already been made on plant and publicity that makes money. Therefore, copyright is extended by the publisher by providing a new introduction in the case of novels, plays and poems, thus making it a new book; or getting it revised by an outside expert for academic books. Copyright could also be extended by the author’s estate which is quite often the case. What this means is that reprint rights do not automatically fall into public domain after 50 years of an author’s demise; they have to be applied for, usually to the original publishers who keep track of the author’s estate or of the new owners, if any.

And copyright extends not merely to the text but to a range of products that go into the making of a book— design, layout and print. For instance, Shakespeare is out of copyright and can be reprinted by any publisher provided it is set afresh. Re-setting isn’t simple; proofs have to be read and re-read before they are printed off for the final edition. All this takes time and money, which could overprice the book against cheaper, competing editions.

Technology means two things to the publisher’s world: the photocopier —which becomes more and more sophisticated with spiral binding built into the machines — and the internet. With the photocopier, the question is why buy six or 60 copies of a publication when you can make do with one or reprint as and when the demand arises? The irony is the photocopier is the direct descendant of the printing press, the starting point for copyright law. Thus, copyright’s technological foundation has turned into an enemy.

The internet has its upside and downside. The upside is that a great deal of material that may not be commercially viable can now be posted on the internet. It is, and will continue to be, a great source of information. The downside is readers could move away from print to the digitized world which is bound to have an impact on the publishing world and on its authors. All this does not mean that posthumous publishing has a bleak future. Photocopied books aren’t illegal as long as they are not done commercially. Second, good books will always be in demand. As Hemingway said somewhere, all great writers compete only with the dead.