Book piracy continues to grow in Mexico – El Financiero

When digital books are shared without any restriction in lawyers’ own chats and the beneficiaries ‘celebrate’ access to culture due to the kindness of the sponsor, something is very wrong in terms of understanding and respect for copyright in our means, medium. In the same way, if a colleague shows off his digital collection of more than three thousand legal books that he puts up for sale for a ‘modest’ fee – and finds buyers – things are simply out of control.

These two references serve to illustrate the brutal deterioration of the already scarce culture of respect for intellectual property rights in the country, which leads to the chilling figure that, for every two copies that are read, one is a pirate. This data comes from the Mexican Center for the Protection and Promotion of Copyright (Cempro), which identifies that the figures have increased due to the pandemic effect, particularly in the case of digital versions.

The resilient and flexible publishing industry has survived the culture of photocopying and the threat of duplication on magnetic media such as usb and the cd. These transfer mechanisms, at least, faced the natural obstacle of their physical delivery, but from the exponential growth of electronic platforms and social networks, the unrestricted transfer of files and media containing books of all kinds finds no contention.

In this context, the recent announcement of the signing of a collaboration agreement between Cempro and Mercado Libre to combat piracy on its well-known electronic commerce platform is very good news. As we know, these marketing structures are becoming the distributors of large volumes of books, transforming generalized habits to the point of displacing traditional bookstores. We must not forget that Amazon itself started its unstoppable platform selling precisely books.

The agreement is a good message about the increased levels of commitment that the platforms are assuming as part of a complex logistics that is exploited by illegal users. It is clear that the experience that has been accumulated in the world with tools such as the so-called ‘notice and withdrawal’, which initially allows downloading musical content suspected of copyright infringement, can be transferred with adaptations to the trafficking of counterfeit products and other forms of piracy.

In this sense, it is transcendental to recognize that not only do we have to imagine new tools to combat copying, plagiarism and falsification, but also very particularly, the credibility of a system must be rebuilt without which the human right of access to culture , could not be explained.

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