| A Consumer Electronics Association advert by Owen Blacker on flickr.com, CC BY-NC 2.0 Who are the real pirates? - www.youwouldnt.com, CC BY 3.0 Image A comparative chart of the prices of specific popular media items in India. CC BY 3.0 "Much had been done by the Potter publishers, just short of calling in the navy and air force, with the unprecedented levels of protective fuss including setting up a 24-hour anti-piracy hotline , armed guards, all-night vigils, and armored convoys worldwide shipping the book from airports to stores." Asia Times Online
Last week, the multi-ethnic city of Hyderabad in south India – the city I was raised in - was hit by serial blasts killing 42 persons and injuring about 50 others. The navy and the air-force were not summoned, no hot-lines established. This article is not about terrorism and the bootlegging of deadly arms and explosives, but is instead about something far deadlier: media piracy.
In a chapter titled "Piracy" in his seminal book "Free
Culture", Lawrence Lessig distinguishes two kinds of piracy - the abhorrent commercial 'Piracy I', rampant in Asia and Eastern Europe and which, notwithstanding many cute excuses, is "wrong" (the word is employed as many as 16 times in this short section of the chapter), and the other sort of piracy, fondly titled "taking", which occurs when people use the Internet to download music albums. This latter type of piracy is stated to be not-so-wrong for reasons including “because the industry is not asking the right questions” and “because much of this piracy is motivated by a new way of spreading content caused by changes in the technology of distribution”. Online piracy is not wrong, but is only a question of "balance".
I would like, in this article, to mount a defence of the much calumniated Asian pirates (even those in Eastern Europe). In doing so, I will try to highlight how the appellation of pirate belongs “more to the definer than the defined”.
I need to issue a preliminary caveat or mea culpa here to readers. I owe much of my crucial non-formal education to various forms of piracy. All the computers I have ever used (dating from the late 80s) have operated on pirated software. In the early 90s, my brother and I devised ("invented") an elaborate electronic wire scheme to pirate cable TV so that we could watch Star TrekTM and The Wonder YearsTTMTM. Most of the books I have read have been either pirated or second-hand copies. Most of the music I listen to was downloaded illegally off the Internet (which, for a while in the initial years, we accessed using a hacked account). Last year, I began hosting a site of Free Indian Supreme Court Judgments which was effectively a rehashed, improved (cooler, I insist) version of the government website - pirated from them, in fact. And so on - stuff that doesn’t get onto CVs. So my objectivity in this article may be a bit impaired. (In defence of my character, I have never shoplifted, I love animals and am moved by music.)
For three reasons, I think classifying piracy in India as wrong may be too simplistic a way of looking at this phenomenon.
Firstly, most legal media commodities that are sold in India are exorbitantly priced and are largely unaffordable by the average consumer. In this context, the pirates may be seen to be facilitating a parallel economy which caters to those who are unjustly priced out of the mainstream market. In support of this point (as ‘Defence Exhibit 1’) I would like to produce a comparative chart of the prices of specific popular media articles in India and the US and projecting those prices in terms of per capita GDP data (see the table in the photo slide show, on the right).
This table demonstrates the injustice that the "Asian market" levels of prices would cause if they were imposed in the United States. I assume the same test is replicable for countries like the UK and Canada.
Spectacular news reports of "anti piracy" raids only serve as periodic reminders of the magnitude of the market that the major publishers refuse to serve. For instance, consider the following statement from an article in the International Journal of Higher Education:
"Stacked to the ceiling in one shop alone were pirated copies of 70,000 books, from copies of first-year chemistry books, to reproductions of pricey medical texts - enough copies to stock a large American-university bookstore."
More than the publishing industry, it is the pirate industry which shows India up as a nation of voracious readers constantly endeavouring, against odds, to educate itself.
Secondly, whilst Harry Potter has come to be regarded as the poster boy for anti-piracy campaigns, it is in fact professional books such as medical and engineering textbooks, that are pirated most extensively in India. In a revealing survey reportedly conducted by the Federation of Publishers' and Booksellers' Associations in India (FPBAI) in 2000 it was found that 85 out of 110 retail sellers of medical books in Delhi were selling pirated copies – a fact that signals that much of the medical profession in India today could owe its existence to this hidden subsidy by the pirate industry. In addition to catering to our domestic market, the IIPA in 2004 reported that the Indian pirate industry was exporting low-priced copies of textbooks to other Southeast Asian countries.
This situation is analogous to the position in other developing nations including Brazil, Egypt, Nepal and China. In 2004, the International Chronicle of Higher Education reported that in Latin America as a whole, "illegal reproduction of books is a staggering $7-billion industry, far outpacing the $4-billion legal publishing industry". While this statement is intended to elicit outrage and perhaps a commitment to cracking down on piracy, one cannot suppress the lingering question of how many of the consumers of this $7 billion pirate industry would in fact be able to afford the difference. As the Debora Halbert, Colin Darch and Alan Story point out in the Copy South report: “what is lost to individuals and nations through the criminalisation of copying is nothing less than access to the means for living a safe, healthy and dignified life”.
Thirdly, and this merely buttresses the previous issues, one is compelled to wonder why the regional language publishing industry in India is immune to the problems of piracy. Piracy is a malaise unique to the English language publishing industry and this is despite the fact that regional language authors, for instance in Telugu, are raging successes selling many thousands of copies. These figures compare favourably with the sales figures of English bestsellers. What then accounts for the pirates’ lack of interest in this potentially lucrative business? Regarding the Telugu book industry, I would venture to suggest that the answer lies in the fact that these books are priced very low to begin with, ranging between Rs. 20 ($0.5) to Rs. 300 ($7) with the most popular books being available for around Rs 100 ($2.5). This makes piracy commercially unviable, socially unnecessary. The ability of the regional publishers to deliver low cost books without loss of quality exposes the fact that publishing and expensive publishing are two distinct activities, and that copyright is being deployed exclusively in service of the latter.
To conclude, I’d like to respond to a slightly unsavoury comparison Lessig makes between consumers of pirated goods and alcoholics: “We don’t give the alcoholic a defense when he steals his first beer, merely because that will make it more likely that he will buy the next three.”
More than anything else that Lessig has said, I think it is this sentence that mounts the harshest of critiques against the existence of copyright. When one contemplates this casual transformation of a nation of bibliophiles and autodidacts into diseased addicts, it unmasks the ethical hollowness of the entire copyright system.
As Upendra Baxi has pointed out, “It is not that the Indian people.. are unable to develop a strong commitment to legalism. It is rather that both the rulers and the ruled collectively feel that most legal rules do not set any genuine moral constraints to behaviour motivated by strong personal or group constraints”
tags: hyderabad india education piracy developing-countries price economics textbooks |
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