Police help sought to keep Harry Potter’s secret

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”.

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’.” 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.”

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