The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) conducted a raid on a major book pirate of Karachi, National Booksellers of Urdu Bazaar, and recovered a large quantity of pirated Oxford University Press textbooks.

National Booksellers have been long cheating students, parents, and retail booksellers by supplying pirated Oxford books to them. While carrying out the raid, the FIA met with a great deal of resistance from the Urdu Bazaar Market Committee and the Preedy Street Police Station staff but effectively managed to seize large quantities of pirated copies of New Active English, New Oxford Social Studies for Pakistan, Nardban-e-Urdu, and Islamiyat for O Level.

Proprietor of National Booksellers, Majeed Gaba, was arrested on charges of supplying pirated books in gross violation of the Copyright Laws of Pakistan and an FIR has been registered against him under the Copyrights Ordinance. Following a three-day remand granted by the court prosecuting the case, he is currently being detained by the FIA for interrogation.

Such violations of Intellectual Property Rights are causing an annual loss of Rs10 billion to the Pakistan Government and are poisoning the economic life of the country by reducing investment and robbing bona fide publishers, authors, editors, designers, and illustrators of their dues. The violators do not care about Pakistan or its economy and are cheating parents and students by selling the pirated books as original.

By reducing the market for bona fide publishers and preventing them from benefiting from scale economies, they are actually causing book prices to rise.