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Crime author Val McDermid has directly appealed to the government and police for e-book pirates to be “brought down and closed down”.
Speaking at the International IP Enforcement Summit in London today (11th June), the bestselling Scottish writer called for more law enforcement on copyright infringers, but also more education for those who commit the crime.
She referenced one pirate who repeatedly put up PDF versions of 19 of her books, selling a collection of them all for just £5, despite being served with cease and desist notices from her publisher and taking them down in each instance.
“If I want to give it up for free, that is my right, but it is about respecting the work,” McDermid said. “I cannot control the relationship with the reader; once it goes from my hands into their hands, I have no control after that. But I can control the form. I can control that what you get is what I want you to get, not what some third party wants you to get. Without control there is no integrity in a piece of work. If you remove the copyright then you remove the integrity of what I have created.”
McDermid said she entirely rejected any suggestion that copyright was a form of censorship. “I am not closing down any libraries,” she said, in a dig at the government. "That is not what I am trying to say here. I worked at this, I made this. I made it and without that the thing in your hand wouldn’t exist. Without that financial support I cannot do that – no one can. Copyright is what gives me the right to make these decisions.”
She added: “If I do not pay my plumber, he can take away my bath. I cannot do that. Once you have read my book, it is in your head, I can’t take it back.”
The author argued that Public Lending Right was not enough for authors to live on and the alternatives of the old fashioned patronage system where rich people paid for artistic work to be created would mean less experimentalism and more “The Emperor’s Clothes” type work emerging, in an argument for why authors should continue to receive decent payment for their work.
“What we need is enforcement. We need these people bringing down and closing down.” She added: “We also need education. A lot of people don’t understand what copyright is and what it means.”
McDermid commented that her book My Granny is a Pirate (Orchard) “would have sold far fewer copies if it was called My Granny is a Dirty Thief."
Earlier in the day, the business secretary Vince Cable called for a global approach to intellectual property protection.
Giving the keynote address in the conference, Cable said that service providers and advertisers needed to boycott "dodgy websites", and alternatives need to be developed, to encourage people to see the merit in using legal routes. "I think we have to recognise that this is not just a British problem, it’s an international problem. Cross-border leakages are now enormous, and there is a recognition of the potential losses as a result of cross-border piracy," he told the delegation.
Figures published by communications watchdog Ofcom last September revealed that more than 1.5 billion files were downloaded illegally in the UK in 2013, accounting for almost a quarter (22%) of all content consumed online.
Cable said that the Chinese are becoming allies in developing a proper global approach to creative industries intellectual property protection because intellectual property theft there is “very much part of the business way of life.” He said: "Studios are being established at the moment which, within a few years, will be the biggest source of film production in the world, overtaking the US and India very quickly. It has occurred to the Chinese that if they have this creative industry they’ll need to protect its content."
Culture minister Ed Vaizey told the conference said that copyright infringements had to be tackled through education as well as through legislation.
“We should have a straightforward view to say that you wouldn’t walk into a record store and take something without paying for it so the same should apply for digital products,” he told the delegation. The government takes its work in this area very seriously. Enforcement is one side of it but it is also important that customers have access to legal content and that companies move into that space where customers can download things legally. We have seen a massive increase in downloads being available legally.”
He said the government had blocked 40 pirate sites which would help to stop “casual infringers”, but conceded that blocking sites would not dissuade the “determined infringer” from accessing illegal content. He added that the police were also working with credit cards companies to try and block payments being processed from pirate sites. “We have to make it clear these are not altruistic people wanting to make content available for free for everyone. They are making money out of this,” Vaizey said.
Going forward, the government intended to apply pressure on companies such as Google to stop pirate sites appearing in searches. “I do think we need to do more on search engines,” Vaizey said. “It still remains the case that you can still find far too many of these sites through a Google search, so we need to work more closely with the search engines to reduce this.”
Adrian Leppard, commissioner of the City of London Police, spoke about witnessing the effect of copyright infringement on victims first hand. “In all of these cases there is a victim behind it,” he said. “The man who has remortgaged his house to find the missing piece, only to have it stolen,” for example, he said. Only 5% of fraud will “reach our books”, the police commissioner said, and that only 10% of that figure make it to the courts. He also said the money coming from Intellectual Property Crime was moving towards funding terrorism. “We can show categorically the links between this space and terrorism,” he said. Leppard also added that law enforcement could not tackle intellectual property crime without the support of the private sector.
Many speakers believed that the law needed to evolve to keep up with the modern problem but that other action needed to heavily support that. “The world moves fast so we need to move fast,” one speaker said. Leppard said the UK needs “fundamental” change in legislation.