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Copyright in Iran: The inescapable breach of ethics

Digital products copyright has become the topic of interest in many heated debates around theworld [1]. Copyright infringement, unauthorized use of copyrighted materials, is a more pressingissue than ever and with digital devices now everywhere this violation is much easier to commit

and much harder to detect.

Copyright laws are different from country to country; a work which is copyrighted in onecountry could be available for the public in another [2]. Thus countries have different ways of treating the same concept of copyright: the creator of an original work must have exclusive rightsto it [3]. Some countries keep a work copyrighted until a certain number of years after the deathof its creator, others a certain number of years after its creation and still some others dont careabout the creator at all [2].

The Islamic Republic of Iran is somehow amongst the third group. While several laws have been

passed to protect intellectual property, and Iran has acceded to or joined several treaties,agreements, and conventions of copyright [4], it is a long way from fully enforcing internationalcopyright laws.

The intellectual and proprietary rights of works produced in Iran are protected under the Law for protection of Authors, Composers, and Artists Rights which was passed by the IranianParliament in 1970, before the Islamic Revolution. This law was supplemented with the Law for the protection of Rights of the Authors of Computer Programs in the year 2000 [4].

These laws only protect works created inside the country, i.e. anything created outside theborders of Iran is not considered copyrighted work. This makes it easy to obtain digital content atlittle or no cost. The unethical act of copyright violation in Iran has been going on for years andhas made people believe that pirated digital content, be it music, video or a computer program, istheir birthright. We Iranians take pride in having vast collections of movies, computer programs,etc. for which we havent paid a single penny to the creators, myself included.

Unfortunately, this bad habit of ours has only become worse over time. There are several factorsthat contribute to this: First, Iran has no official copyright relationships with the US, the biggestsource of digital content [5]. Secondly, high prices of original content have led people to findingcheaper ways of obtaining what they want. And thirdly people believe that if something iscreated using technology no effort is put into making it.

The situation has become so bad that even works created in the country are not safe from beingpirated. Many people dont care who is being affected or even hur t by their actions as long asthey are OK. It only gets worse when the people who are content creators themselves don trespect the concept of intellectual property and steal someone elses work. Ive seen professionaldevelopers who are happy to steal ideas, code or even complete programs from their fellowIranian developers.

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Of course in this mess there have been some attempts to bring some order to chaos and at leastprotect Iranian products from having the same fate as foreign products. For example manypeople in the cinema industry have been urging people not to buy pirated versions of Iranianmovies. This industry has tried to eliminate the competition from piracy by selling its products atthe same price but at higher qualities. Although this is not a very elegant solution, it seems to beworking. Also some Iranian software download and development centers such as Softgozar [6]and Bazar [7] refuse to allow access to computer programs developed in Iran free of charge.

Law enforcement agencies in Iran seem to be doing nothing about this problem, at least nothingvisible to the naked eye! There seems to be nothing that can be done to obtain foreign productslegally in the near future , after all they wont sell them to us. But measures need to be taken tomitigate the effects of copyright violation on Iranian products. If something is not done soon thesituation could rapidly deteriorate into a situation where only the law of the jungle applies: Killor be killed, eat or be eaten.

As a human being and a developer I believe that the copyright concept is a logical andundisputable one but there are many hurdles that need to be overcome before it can be fullyaccomplished. These include cultural norms, financial concerns, and greed. Green works bothways: Creators have to offer their content at prices that customers wont feel the need to buypirated content such as the iTunes 99 cents for a song model and also customers have to curbtheir need for free or unusually cheap content at the price of hurting the creators.

References

1. http://www.infotoday.com/it/oct03/dykstra.shtml2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_situations_by_country3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_in_Iran5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-United_States_copyright_relations6. http://www.softgozar.com7. http://www.cafebazaar.ir