Copyrights Elsewhere

If, as an American, you’ve assumed that the publishing rules are the same all over the world as they are here, you’ll want to read an article in The Sydney Morning Herald called “Revoke the Rules and Help Book Pirates.”

It starts off by talking about the book industry in India:

It is a free-marketer's nirvana. India for books is what Thailand is for CDs - a land of piracy. For what you would pay for one Rushdie book in Australia, in India you could get his entire oeuvre.

Then goes into what it’s like in Australia.

We have a separate copyright territory. If a book is written, designed, edited and published by Australians - as is about $900 million worth of books sold in Australia annually - an overseas publisher cannot sell an edition of it here. If it is produced overseas, Australian publishers must publish it here within 30 days of its foreign release, or it can be "parallel-imported" to Australia. If it is out of stock, the publisher has 90 days to replenish it. This "use it or lose it" principle is commonly called the 30/90 rule.

Definitely an interesting article for those, like me, who know little about how it works in other countries. Malcolm Knox, the author of the piece, ends with:

Lifting the restriction on parallel importation would not send us immediately into a copyright free-fire zone like India. But there are plenty cautionary tales about unregulated markets right now and, unlike finance and banking, our cultural industries do not sprout again in a few years. Once second-hand, a culture remains second-hand for a long time. Ask the Indians.

I think most American authors would agree with me when I say, copyrights are important. And in this age of the Internet, copyrights are being challenged even here in the states.