51-yr-old held for copyright violation

A 51-year-old divorcee, who utilized his experience as a photocopy machine attendant at a city hospital, more than a decade ago, to set-up a flourishing trade of copyright infringement of his own, was arrested in south Delhi’s Green Park on Thursday. Jatin Anand reports.

A 51-year-old divorcee, who utilized his experience as a photocopy machine attendant at a city hospital, more than a decade ago, to set-up a flourishing trade of copyright infringement of his own, was arrested in south Delhi’s Green Park on Thursday.

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Chhaya Sharma, deputy commissioner of police (south) said the crackdown on Vinod Kumar Sharma’s residence in Green Park’s X block had yielded pirated medical books, both imported and otherwise, and infringed material stored on CDs estimated to be worth more than R10 lakh.

“In the year 1992, Sharma was allotted a contract for photostat work at AIIMS. It was during his employment there that he got the idea of photocopying high-priced medical science books and selling them to medical students and doctors at comparatively lower prices but which still yielded him a considerable turnover,” said DCP Sharma.

Having learnt the tricks of his trade in just six years, that is from 1992 when he got the said contract till its expiry in 1998, the police were made privy to his activities by an attorney, specially-appointed and put-up to the task, by several Delhi-based publishing houses.

A simple and, at first, clandestine operation that simply involved scanning costly, original books of medical science, printing them with the help of his home-installed Xerox machine, getting them bound in the neighbouring Ber Sarai before packing them off to local booksellers soon got him contacts in other states, too.

“We have reason to believe that Sharma used to supply these books to several other adjacent states as well. He has been arrested under the copyright act,” DCP Sharma added.