Page 28 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE VOL6

A representative of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration was invited on stage to deliver the IPA flag to Emma House, director of the Publishers’ Association in the UK, signifying the handover of host of the congress from Bangkok to London next yearcopies of textbooks were the piracy happening in China, but now every- thing has changed. With the transition to electronics, online piracy is growing up. Small websites use publishers’ content combined with their own technology to repackage it and sell it to medium and small customers. This also includes people who open online stores and sell passwords to access the data at a very low price.”Guanxi, which means partnership, is an important cultural factor in Chi- nese society and may be a key in the fight against piracy. It means partner- ship in the industry and also conveys a sense of building up a better relation- ship with prior enemies.In 2010, the International Publish- ers Copyright Protection Coalition (IPCC) was founded to give the book industry more power to negotiate with the government.“Five years ago,” Mr Zhang said, “if you searched Alibaba, a well known commercial site in China, you would find more than 5,000 lists sell- ing illegal database passwords and pirated e-books. Realistically, without any partnership, it would be a long and26 Elite+painful process to stop them, since if we closed a website today, they would change their name and reopen it tomorrow.”Instead of suing Alibaba, the IPCC signed a partnership agreement and set up a green channel where the asso- ciation could report piracy issues directly to someone overseeing the issue. Mr Zhang suggested that such partnerships are a viable strategy for winning the copyright battle, using diplomatic soft-power over strict law enforcement.The closing statements at the congress underlined the industry’s importance to education. IPA secretary-general Jens Bammel declared five resolutions for a healthy publishing environment: authorities must ensure that this creative industry can remain self-reliant and competi- tive in a capitalist world, governments must educate the public aboutcopyright and promote enforcement of copyright law on both conventional and digital platforms, UNESCO should consider including e-books in the definition of books, and govern- ments should implement national book policies to ensure the continued exis- tence of independent local publishers. The final call was for all countries including Thailand to grant publishers and authors freedom of speech to crit- icize any aspect of political institu- tions.To conclude the event, a represen- tative of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration was invited on stage to deliver the IPA flag to Emma House, director of the Publishers’ Association in the UK, signifying the handover of host of the congress from Bangkok to London next year