This goes out to company owners and C-Suite executives. The next time you are speaking your heart out, unveiling your secret plans, shooting emails on what the firm needs to do – think again.
The listener/note taker/recipient may be recording you. Worse still, if she has a flair for writing, a publisher may be waiting for the content with open arms.
Why even publisher where, for better or worse, there is some sort of editorial check ad fear for libel costs. How about self publishing – a new frontier where ‘authors’ of content that would scare pedigreed publishers, have found a forum for releasing more or less whatever they want.
And having written just their side of the story, these ‘authors’ now have sites like amazon, kindle for amplification. In a matter of few minutes, they can covet a global audience, a choice of cover, a look, feel and typeface that they fancy, and bingo, ‘the-barrier-to-the-book-I-always-wanted-to-write’ is history!
Follow that up with a few tweets, and with a bit of luck, a legal notice from the affected party, the e-book might even go viral!
Now what could be the problem hereIJ
Isn’t it artistic freedom not to mention an employee’s right under Article 19(1) of the Constitution – some might ask youIJ
Well, the problem, more often than not, lies inside the minds of self-publishing authors.
They forget that all their Constitutional Freedoms are subject to reasonable restrictions.
And in the absence of traditional buffers like professional editors and business models that restrain the traditional publishing house, the recourse to libelous or commercially-sensitive content (including audio, video and pictures) is dared primarily because courts could take several years to punish the guilty.
So, has your firm or company started out with more detailed contracts that capture this emerging nuisanceIJ
If not – think.
Just look around for evidence. Even the once infallible government of India, covered as it is with the draconian Official Secrets Act, 1923 (OSA) is looking helpless.
And the scourge wouldn’t seem limited to epublishing. Today, there are publishers dime a dozen who would print you in the physical world in no time.
Take redoubtable PC Parakh, a former coal secretary, who I spoke to for a column after a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) FIR was filed against him last year. The otherwise conservative bureaucrat didn’t stay quiet for too long. Even as the probe is underway, Parakh has penned a book that takes the blame straight to Manmohan Singh’s door!
This could happen only because some publishers are willing to be more daring and merits of writing against the Premier of the land, even when the CBI is probing you, far exceed the merits of silence and trial by the media.
Ditto for Dr Sanjaya Baru. My former boss and ex media advisor to PM has written a compelling account of the relationship between Manmohan Singh and Singh’s political boss Sonia Gandhi. Most of the narrative treads upon the OSA. But the net impact of Baru’s narrative of select events and anecdotes has hit the diarchy where it hurts the most.
Is there a Parakh or Baru in your firmIJ look around.
(The columnist works at the intersect of media, regulation and strategy on RIl. The views are personal.Tweets @therohitbansal).