Voicing concerns of the publishing industry, the industry experts on Friday urged the government to include ‘copyright infringement’ as part of the copy right act 1957. The industry raised the issue of digital piracy during a seminar also attended by the representatives of the government's copyright office.

Agreeing to the concerns raised by the industry at the seminar titled ‘curbing digital and online piracy in publishing industry’ organised by FICCI and Association of Publishers in India, GR Raghavender, director and registrar of copyrights, government of India said, “With 2.1 billion users accessing internet at some point of the day, the revenue coming from the publishing industry gets affected by online piracy be it revenue from sales or excise tax. The export of books by Indian authors contributes a lot to the government revenue and piracy restricts that. So that’s a major concern for us.”

He further added, “The adverse effect of the online piracy and its economic importance has been studied by the national productivity council in 1999. The online piracy rate in India is in fact more than countries like China and Russia.”

The large-scale photocopy of the expensive books - material of fiction or academic excellence - was also cited as a major concern at the event. India has been ranked fourth in the list of countries with the highest commercial value of pirated software in the 2011 Business Software Alliance annual piracy study.

Among the publishers present were PM Sukumar of Harper Collins along with Peter Booth Wiley, chairman of the board, John Wiley & Sons. Wiley primarily spoke about what happened with file-hosting service Megaupload, a Hong Kong-based company, which led to organisation being tagged as an “organisation dedicated to copyright infringement” and resulted in the indictment of several of its executives.

Amendments in the Copyright Act of 1957 and intellectual property rights were among other issues which were discussed at the event.