Opinion Copycat incentives

The IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Himalayan blunder occurred because a paragraph was copied,without attribution,from Down to Earth. Since public memory is short,we no longer remember that the industry chapter of the Economic Survey for 1995-96 copied the text verbatim from the corresponding chapter for 1994-95,changing only the numbers,and in one instance,forgetting to do even that.

Proudhon coined the slogan “Property is theft.” For physical property,few people will agree. However,historically,attitudes towards intellectual property have been different in India. The Vedas stand for knowledge and anyone who sells and commercialises the Vedas is condemned. The country must awake into a heaven of freedom “where knowledge is free.” It is a separate matter that those who have written tracts against intellectual property have ensured copyright remains in their names.

There are different forms of intellectual property,with a traditional difference between industrial property (patents,trademarks,industrial designs,geographical indications) and literary and artistic works (copyright and related rights). As a general global trend,while industrial property protection has become stronger,that of copyright has become weaker. Technology is partly responsible. But it is also true that post-Uruguay Round,IPR protection is stronger in India — de jure and de facto — since enforcement has improved. We may still get a report from the Business Software Alliance stating that software piracy in India is high by global standards. However,as a trend,piracy rates have dropped.

There is greater IPR awareness,even among the judiciary and the police. There are several law firms specialising in IPR. There wouldn’t have been a SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions) with an emphasis on grassroots inventions earlier.

There is also a price angle. If software and video piracy has dropped,that’s largely because prices are lower. But there is a physical versus non-physical issue that goes beyond the dichotomy between industrial property and copyrights. Music is usually,though not invariably,protected by copyright. Few of us are likely to walk away with a music DVD from a retail music store without paying. But resistance to illegal free downloads is less. With two colleagues,I recently edited a health report for India. This was a priced publication,published commercially by a publisher,but wasn’t priced particularly high. A respected fellow academic asked me for a free soft copy. That I refused is irrelevant. The point is that this academic wouldn’t have gone to a bookstore and walked out with the report without paying. However,there is a cavalier attitude towards soft and non-physical copies and we have a special problem with academia and the education system.

Publishers have a pre-publication system of vetting manuscripts. One such manuscript turned up recently and it had large sections on IPR. Technology has made copying and pasting easier. But it has also made the detection of crime easier. A Net search revealed that this manuscript had been copied verbatim from an existing report on IPR.

Most educational institutes in developed countries have a policy on plagiarism. I am not aware of a single Indian institute that does. One can’t expect such a policy if faculty members themselves are guilty of plagiarism,in lifting lecture notes and even setting examination papers. But simultaneously,there is an emphasis on getting students to work on independent research reports and one is not talking about MPhil/ PhD theses. For the most part,these are copied from elsewhere and because of faculty laziness,go undetected. When detected,they go unpunished. The US has a statutory body called the Office of Research Integrity for scientific misconduct. We don’t have one and there is no independent ethics body. There is an informal Society for Scientific Values,but all its investigations have been restricted to the physical sciences. Social sciences are outside its purview.

Incentives are increasingly linked to research output and there are pressures to publish. Without publishing,one is damned. But those pressures are as much applicable to social sciences as to the physical sciences.

Discussions about developing an IPR culture in India often get bogged down in law and modernisation of patent and copyright offices. These are undoubtedly important,but we need to fix the education system. That’s rarely addressed. Consider the useful reports of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC). While there are reports on innovation and these also talk about IPR,those sections are about innovation constraints for manufacturing enterprises,infrastructure and human resources in IPR offices and collaborations between industry and academia. There is nothing about the culture of academia. Without that,we won’t substantially increase the number of PhDs or patent applications. Western (meaning English) education was introduced because the British East India Company needed clerks and translators.

Clerks and translators didn’t need to think. Their job was to faithfully reproduce,the more faithful,the better. The educational system hasn’t transcended this and evaluation and examinations still focus on faithful reproduction,not independent thinking. Add to this the perception that non-commercial violations are acceptable and needn’t be culpable. This moral issue is more difficult to address than a limited legal one.

Tom Lehrer was several things — song-writer,satirist,mathematician — and produced a gem. “Plagiarise,Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,So don’t shade your eyes,But plagiarise,plagiarise,plagiarise…. Only be sure always to call it,please,‘research’.” Etymologically,“research” may have meant something else,but we have converted it to “re-search”. There are several software programmes to detect plagiarism and some are non-proprietary. How many Indian educational institutes use them or even know about them?

The writer is a Delhi-based economist express@expressindia.com