Publisher turns sleuth, busts book photocopying racket

Ankit Thakkar, 26, who manages Snow White publications, turn ed sleuth to find the source of pirated copies of books published by his company on law and taxation for aspiring charted accountants.

Thakkar said: “Few weeks ago one my friends, who is pursuing CA, revealed that books on Financial Reporting and Direct Taxes Law ­ whose sole right of publication is with the firm ­ are available in the market for less than one-fourth of the books' price. We were told spiral-bound photocopies of both the books were sold to students in Andheri for Rs 500 compared to the original price of Rs 2,000 to Rs 2,500.“

Thakkar along with his friend visited Famous Xerox outlets in Andheri. “During our enquiry we came to know three such prominent places are selling our books by violating its intellectual property rights. We were incurring heavy losses,“ said Thakkar.

Thakkar's friend said: “We visited each of the centres and purchased the photocopied books as evidence.“ He said that Famous Xerox has three shops in Andheri, owned by Samadhan Jadhav, under Dadabhai Nauroji Nagar police station.

Thakkar said the photocopy centre first purchased the original books from the stand and scanned them in PDFs. The PDF was handed over to all photocopy centres to get a black and white copy of the book and handed over to the customers in spiral bound format. Thakkar approached the police station and registered an FIR under copyright infringement and offence of infringement of copyright not less than three months and a penalty of Rs 50,000 which can be extended up to Rs 3 lakh of Copyright Act, 1957.

A police source who was a part of the raid said that when the team reached the photocopy centres it appeared that apart from complainant's publication house, books by Adya and Best Words publications were also being photocopied.

The police seized a computer and a scanner used for creating soft copies of the books.

Jadhav was arrested and produced before the designated court, and granted bail.

Source | Mumbai Mirror | 19 August 2015