Copyright, AI taking centre stage as EA's biggest book event beckons

As the book fair beckons, AI and copyright are raising fresh questions about the future of publishing. [Courtesy, AI]

In the coming week, all roads lead to the Sarit Expo Centre, where the Nairobi International Book Fair kicks off on Wednesday, running through Sunday. The fair brings together publishers, authors, booksellers, readers and other players in the book trade, with the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature among its major attractions.

And while for many the unveiling of the winner of the JKPL is the highlight of the fair, there is a lot more that goes on there. First, for readers and booksellers, it is a one-stop shop to find out what new products have been released by various publishers. In this regard, many authors and publishers use the occasion to launch their new books. On Thursday I will be there launching several of my own, hot off the press, courtesy of a veteran publishing editor who has been putting my feet to the deadline fire over the past couple of months.

Another important business associated with international book fairs is rights transactions. Many publishers, through their acquisition editors, travel halfway across the world scouting for books already doing well in other corners of the world. They then contact the publishers of those works to see whether they can license the books to sell in their own territories. Others acquire permission to translate such works into other languages. This is what happens at the world’s major rights-oriented book fairs, including Frankfurt, London and Bologna, as well as major regional fairs such as Guadalajara and Sharjah. The process explains how books such as The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe reach readers in other languages. Things Fall Apart alone has been translated into at least 57 languages.

The beauty of these deals is that you pay a one-off fee, or agree on a royalty percentage, and instead of publishing a new book, you have a book that has already found readers elsewhere ready for a new market. It is gratifying to see that this line of business is picking up in East Africa. For it not only spurs the book business but also helps put a stop to copyright impunity.

Talking of copyright impunity, there was a time when publishers were even hesitant to market their books for fear of pirates. For the moment one’s book was made an examinable set book, meaning it would sell in large volumes in the months that followed, the River Road underworld acquired a copy, cloned it and started going round the country selling its copies, in much the same way Nairobi has been flooded with fake wines and spirits in recycled bottles, complete with fake regulatory stickers.

The tragedy with this impunity where copyright is concerned is that it was so pervasive that even in institutions of higher learning, it was not uncommon for tutors and lecturers to leave copies of copyrighted works for learners to photocopy. This, of course, changed as licensing arrangements emerged to regularise such copying. In Kenya, the Reproduction Rights Society of Kenya, KOPIKEN, licenses reproduction of copyright-protected works, including photocopying and collects fees on behalf of rightsholders.

We are also coming from an era when one just quoted a whole chunk of text from another book and either did not bother to attribute the excerpt to the rightful author or did not see the need to seek permission to use such copyrighted works for commercial purposes. Others, when caught, even had the cheek to say that they had acknowledged the author, so it was OK. For them, once you acknowledged the original author and listed the work and the publisher in the references, there was no need to seek permission to use excerpts from such works. Slowly but surely, however, we are turning the corner on copyright and are increasingly treating copyrighted works as other people’s property that we have no right to ‘steal’.

These gains on the copyright front have, of course, come at a great cost. Many publishers have produced thousands of copies of works, had them duly approved for use in schools by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development, then had them distributed to all corners of the country, only to realise that the piracy underworld had already beaten them to the market.

The matter was complicated further by a lack of a clear law-enforcement framework, despite years of clamour by publishers for stronger enforcement of copyright. So it took the effort of publishers themselves to work with the police on a case-by-case basis, storming bookshops that had stocked pirated copies and driving the fear of the law into booksellers, so that they also became cautious enough to source books only from their rightful publishers and authors. This sometimes meant having a special number or mark on the books.

Copyright aside, book fairs are a great platform to thrash out some of the sticky issues around publishing and literature. What immediately comes to mind is AI and how it affects publishing. For instance, does AI-generated content qualify as copyrighted material? In other words, can I claim copyright ownership for a work generated using ChatGPT and other large language models? The answer is not simply yes or no. The US Copyright Office says copyright protection depends on whether a human has contributed sufficient original expression, while a mere prompt is not enough on its own.

And now that many publishers nowadays ask authors of accepted works to proof them using tools such as Grammarly, ProWritingAid, LanguageTool and Microsoft Editor, do such works qualify as purely human-generated, or where do we exactly draw the line between the use of text-manipulation tools and human creativity? These and other questions warrant panel discussions by experts to shed light on how publishers can craft policies to help them navigate AI use in their daily operations.

And next week will not be all about panel discussions, copyright deals and book launches. It is also a time for old friends in the literary world to meet and have a healthy chat over a cup of tea, lunch or something with a little more potency to stir the creative spirit. It is also time to make new friends among book lovers.