Legal overviews
Intellectual Wednesdays: online piracy, publishing houses and conscious society
- Service: Intellectual Property (IP)
- Date: 16.10.2019
In the regular column Intellectual Wednesdays (Season 2, Episode 6), IP experts at Capital Legal Services Practice Elena Berger and Vladislav Scherbatykh not only analyzed Eksmo’s latest case, but also explained why the fight against piracy is actually beneficial for society and culture.
When it comes to online piracy, disputes related to illegal distribution of films, programs or music are the first to come to mind. However, book publishers as much as others are affected by pirates, and recently they have been implementing stronger measures in the anti-piracy campaign. Today’s edition of #IntellectualWednesdays is about “literary pirates” and the fight against them.
Earlier this week, news came out that Eksmo, a Russian publisher, had discovered that electronic versions of printed books it published were being sold on Avito, a classifieds web site. Eksmo then filed a complaint with the police regarding several of these sellers. What could the sellers of counterfeit e‑books face, and to what extent is their liability justified?
The first issue is that finding the sellers themselves may not be easy. As far as we understand from the TASS article, we are talking about individuals, and most likely Avito does not have much data about them. In principle, the copyright holder could swiftly file a lawsuit seeking compensation (for example, from 10,000 to 5,000,000 rubles), but then it would be practically impossible for it to find the infringer on its own. It should also be taken into account that if the infringers are individuals, the recovery of damages from them is hardly justified – the court most likely will not award a large compensation, and the expenses tied to recovering it could significantly exceed the amount recovered.
In such cases, turning to the law enforcement authorities is justified, because for copyright infringement both civil and administrative liability are provided (including a fine from 1,500 to 2,000 rubles). Of course, the fine is paid in favor of the state, and the copyright holder will not receive anything, but the police have a much better chance of finding the seller. For example, a test purchase can help find the seller (for example, the seller could provide a bank account number for the money transfer, etc.). Moreover, invoking administrative liability can sometimes achieve the most important goal – stopping the violation and showing the market that the copyright holder is actively fighting for its rights.
It may seem that the violation is not so serious that it would have to be punished in any manner, especially since we are talking about protecting the interests of a large publishing house against an individual who decided to earn a small amount of money by selling electronic versions of printed books. However, it is important to remember that copyright protection is ultimately beneficial to society and, above all, to individual authors.
The purpose of copyright is to protect the fruits of authors' work, which significantly increases such fruits in value and increases the motivation of authors to create. A copyright infringement reduces the income of the publisher (people who bought the electronic version on Avito from a pirate are unlikely to go to the bookstore for the same book), and the author’s fee is often tied to the sale of his books. This, in turn, deprives the author of a fraction of revenue that he could count on from the result of his creative work. It is advantageous for society that talented creative authors can rest assured that their work is protected by the state, because this will give them the motivation to develop culture and contribute something new to it. In this regard, despite the seeming “severity” or disproportion, the fight against piracy in all areas is, in fact, a noble cause and is beneficial to society.