We are told that unauthorised copies of the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) are being sold in Manila for less than a third of the local price of legit copies. You can do something about piracy. But how do you deal with the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which holds the copyright to what is supposed to be, not only a public, but a universal document? Unfetter the distribution and you put the pirates out of business. Alas, the possibility of this happening is almost nil.
As the good folks at IMO say, the STCW publication has “value added”. We can imagine the amount of the value – documenting conference proceedings, typing, copy editing, layouting, proofreading etc. The International Labour Organisation does the same type of secretarial work. Why is it that ILO doesn’t appropriate what really is the collective output of individual member states? The full texts of ILO conventions are free to download from the ILO website. It’s no consolation that STCW conference papers can be accessed in the IMO website: people need the hot brewed coffee and not teaspoonfuls of the coffee grind.
Presumably, individual governments could make the STCW together with the accompanying Code available to their seafarers by uploading it to their websites. They have the perfect right to do so as they provided the inputs without which there would be no STCW. But how many IMO member states bother? Indeed, how many seafarers and maritime executives care to obtain copies of the STCW and read the full text? We once raised the issue in a LinkedIn discussion group and one chap just shrugged his shoulder. He said there were more important issues that should concern the shipping industry.
Selling books is obviously one of them. ~Barista Uno
Related blog posts:
Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe IMO as publishers rather than booksellers.
They no longer have an on-site bookshop. They do sell, of course, but its mainly done through distributors.
Of those authorised distributors, there is only one which is a registered charity and pledges to plough any profits back into supporting the well-being of seafarers.
That is The Marine Society, the world’s oldest seafarers’ not-for-profit.
So why don’t we all encourage individuals and corporates alike to make their purchases through The Marine Society’s online portal which happens, by the way, to be far easier to navigate than IMO’s labyrinthian website!
http://www.msbookshop.org
The place to buy IMO publications!