The Harry Potter books seem to encourage all kinds of mysteriously inordinate behaviour in their readers. But compared to the other excesses, the burgeoning market for pirated editions of the latest novel in urban India is perhaps the least mysterious. The busiest streets in Mumbai are merrily hawking pirated Harry Potters, with people buying them without any sense of anything illegal about these books. They are much cheaper than the proper ones ? sometimes less than a third of the legal price. And there is also the pleasure of bargaining. Copyright crime is one of those criminal offences in India which are conducted in the most public of places (at least, the selling, if not the printing of these books), and getting a ?cool brand? cheaper than others fills the ordinary Indian with a pleasure that far overrides legal scruples. So the book piracy market thrives in the subcontinent (and in Latin America), feeding on a general attitude of callousness and ignorance of the laws in people.

Indian copyright laws are fairly tight, but their enforcement severely lax. This is, of course, largely a result of police corruption. Large-scale piracy ventures enjoy the tacit support of the police. Hence, raids are never properly conducted. Even if they are, the immense backlog of cases in the courts prevents conviction, and hardly any are made. Hence, publishers, distributors, booksellers and writers incur losses of Rs 350-450 crore from piracy every year. Piracy denies the writer his proper income from creativity and decreases tax revenues for the government. Yet it remains a largely invisible crime, kept up at various levels of social and cultural activity. Something as apparently innocuous as indiscriminate photocopying, indulged in by libraries, educational institutions and students all the time, is a serious infringement of copyright law. Besides books, the piracy of software, music and films is another growing area of international and inter-state illegal activity. With advances in printing and copying technology, such crime is becoming easier by the day, and more difficult to track down and punish. As with all such socially accepted breakings of the law, the market for piracy cannot be checked purely through the enforcement of law, but through a systematic building up of public scruple by spreading awareness of the law.