Even as children all over the world anxiously await the July 21 launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the series by J K Rowling, the publishers, Bloomsbury and Penguin India, have sought support of the Mumbai Police to help check the piracy of the book. Not to mention, the worldwide embargo asking the dealers to not open consignments before 6.30 am on July 21.
And this doesn’t come as a surprise, especially when it was in the basement of a highrise in Mumbai’s Haji Ali in 2005 that around 2,500 pirated copies of Rowling's personal favourite Harry Potter and Half-Blood Prince, the sixth in the series, were seized in the first week of its launch.
“Mumbai was the first city where the piracy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince were first reported in 2005. It is for this reason that our representative handed over a letter to Police Commissioner D N Jadhav’s office on Monday to apprise him of this background and seek support from the Mumbai Police to check piracy,” said Akash Chittranshi, counsel for British Publishers’ Association, and head of Aca-law, the law firm that has been “given the mandate to initiate criminal cases against businesses and persons found organising and dealing in piracy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”.
Bloomsbury and Penguin India have commissioned a team of legal experts and vigilance officials, launched an anti-piracy hotline and sought the support of police all over the country to safeguard the wonder boy’s secret.
In 2005, while the book “smashed all records with over 1,60,000 copies sold in hardback” in India with the first day’s sales estimated at "1,00,000 copies”, the raid in Mumbai revealed how organised the piracy racket was: copies reached traffic signals in the first week itself.
Says Chittranshi, “After Mumbai, the pirated version surfaced in Delhi in the second week and police recovered 8,500 copies there. Later, four “big offset printers with organised printing set-up, including Harry Potter prints, were seized in Bangalore”, he said.
A study by investigators IP-Boutique, deployed by the publishers, says: “Modern reproduction and distribution technology is largely available to pirates in India and they deploy such infrastructure to churn out pirated editions that are more or less indistinguishable from the genuine editions to the extent that holograms are effectively copied.”
According Hemali Sodhi, head of Markets and Promotions for Penguin Books India, “This will be the first time that an anti-piracy drive will be initiated following a book launch by an Indian publishing house. While the vigilance team will work closely with the police giving information for raids, the legal team will look into copyright issues.”
P M Shenvi, manager for Strand Book House in Fort, who has been “handling impatient eight-year-olds” over the last three weeks, says, “When I tell them to come by 6.30 am on July 21, they just look at their mothers and say, ‘ma, you better wake up and wake me up on time’.” Strand will open their shutters with 6,500 copies on July 21. It will be a first for Shenvi too. He explains: “In the last 45 years that we have been associated with Penguin India, we have never signed an agreement on the time of release. According to the agreement, we cannot open the consignment before 6.30 am. In fact, even if we manage to get the book by 6.15 am, we will have to wait till the agreement time.”
Sodhi says: “The global embargo is to ensure that very child gets the book at the same time. The security measures undertaken to respect the embargo are also elaborate. We can't disclose logistics, but it's a detailed and comprehensive operation, probably the most complex logistics operation ever undertaken by a book publisher in the country that sees deliveries made simultaneously to over 300 destinations."
Among the six books, it was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which had won the title of “one of the fastest-selling books in publishing history in 2003”. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is already showing signs of breaking the record. In Mumbai alone, the first set of orders for the first day has crossed 35,500 hard back, third to Delhi (68,000) and Bangalore (35,700) with 2, 40,000 orders from across the country. “This itself is a big jump over the last Potter,” adds Sodhi.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Enforcement) Sanjay Mohite said that the police would be involved in the anti-piracy drive only when someone complains about copyright infringement. But “we will give them the required support”, he added.