Increased raids can curb piracy: India Inc

India Inc today said that the flourishing market for pirated and counterfeit goods could be curbed only if the authorities carry out a number of raids and obtained convictions to nail the pirates and intellectual property rights offenders.

"There is no way you can beat a pirate on pricing because he can escape on taxes. The number of raids need to come up to a critical level," Indian Music Industry President V J Lazarus said at a FICCI conference on piracy and brand protection here.

There should be 30,000-40,000 raids a year or the number of illegitimate products in stores will go up, he said.

The advancement of technology has made tackling piracy more challenging, Lazarus said. "Last year, the peer-to-peer (P2P) industry was about USD 69-billion," Lazarus said.

Music, film, publishing and IT (software) industries were the ones where intellectual property rights were violated the most and made all the more vulnerable due to the Internet.

"38 per cent of the software in the world is pirated, which accounts for a loss of USD 46-billion. In India, this number stands at 69 per cent," Business Software Alliance India Co-Chairman Keshav Dhakad said.

India's R&D and Intellectual Property Rights were not robust, he said, adding that "there has been a revenue loss of USD 2.2-billion from 2002-07. Even though India has a high ranking in IT, in terms of competitiveness, it ranks 48th in the world."

Besides, Proctor & Gamble Chairman Bharat Patel said, "Laws in India are not specific to counterfeit and pass-offs. I can attribute sales losses of about 3-5 per cent to these fakes."

"From my experience, "imported" shampoos sold in India having Arabic lettering are all counterfeit from China," Patel said.

"We (the Brand Protection Committee) met with the Secretary, DIPP, over this and he has agreed to arrange a meeting next month with customs officials to come out with solutions," Patel, who is also the Chairman of BPC, said.

Hindustan Unilever CEO Nitin Paranjpe said that no one really had any idea of how big the market for counterfeits and pass-offs was.

"More should be done to protect brands, not because of the economic benefits, but because of the social costs of not winning this (battle against piracy) are too high," Paranjpe said.

"As per my estimate, the stationery industry spends 10 per cent of its revenue on protecting brands, which includes awareness campaigns and educating retailers of fake products sold through their stores,"

Camlin Chairman and Managing Director, Dilip Dandekar said. Dandekar said Camlin had spent Rs 2.5-crore for educating retailers to make them aware of fake products sold in their shops.

Lazarus said the Centre was considering amending the Copyright Act. "A change in the law is coming up.

A note has gone to the Cabinet," he said, adding that he hoped that some positive developments in this regard would fructify soon.