In Search of a Golden Sky

Thursday, December 29, 2005

PIRACY AND HYPOCRICY

This Article was published in the 9th January 2005 issue of Dawn Magazine

The child goes ecstatic looking at the huge collection of pirated Cds of different games I the shop. His father allows him to pick four of them, which cost a mere Rs.100. Had they been original, the cost would have been a whopping Rs.20,000 to Rs. 24,000( A single CD costs between $40 and $100).

In a piracy-free world, this scene would not have been possible in a Third World Country. They dynamics of piracy in the West and the Third World are quite different. Consider ourselves for a moment. There’s no denying the fact that most of us are a bunch of hypocrites. Everyone cries foul when his or her intellectual property gets infringed upon. You can see celebrities every other day on the idiot box exhorting people to stop using pirated stuff. Just catch hold of one of these people and go through their computer. You would be hard pressed to find even a single person with genuine software installed.’Who gives a damn about multi-billion corporations losing a few bucks?’ is the general perception of anyone who buys pirated stuff. This may also mean that it is alright to steal from the rich. The double standard that is prevalent in our society is a result of this kind of hypocrisy. If you yourself don’t refrain from using pirated stuff in any form, how can you expect other people to do the same?

Come to think of it, I myself have hardly in my life bought a genuine thing whose pirated copy was available. Why would you want to buy, for instance, a licensed version of Windows costing a fortune( about Rs.5,800) when you can get that for a meagre Rs.25? This line of thinking is not restricted to software only, but applies to any product which has a cheap pirated version available.

In the beginning of the new millennium, it was said that the piracy rate in Pakistan was 98 per cent. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out it must be cent per cent now. The Washington-based International Intellectual Property Alliance ranked Pakistan one of the world’s largest producers of pirated CDs and other optical discs for export in both 2001 and 2002, and alleged that Pakistan alone cost the movie and music industry around $72 million in 2002.

So the thing is, even if I did want to buy genuine stuff, I couldn’t know the difference between the two. Going by the rampant corruption here, it may after all be the same pirated stuff sold at an exorbitant price to pass off as original. In fact it does happen.

A known international company marred by the pirated games of its first Playstation, came up with an anti-piracy measure built into the hardware of Playstation 2. But even that could not stop the ingenious gurus of piracy, who designed a chip which bypasses this anti-piracy system so that you can play all pirated games. And it is so widespread that you can get your system altered to run the cheap pirated games anywhere in the Saddar electronics market for a mere Rs. 80 to Rs.150.

Right now the company is embroiled in a row with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) over the use of this devious chip.

Likewise in the music industry, major record labels have been fighting a vain battle against the P2P(peer-to-peer) networks like Napster and Kazaa for the last couple of years. The only anti-piracy measure which worked here in Pakistan was the efforts of the depleted local music industry to get MP3 versions of the local artists’ music removed from the entire market. It is the sole instance where a consensus has been reached as far as piracy is concerned. But even that looks like a mirage, particularly when you consider that the local pop industry is taking the help of piracy dons to further its own cause, a relationship very much akin to the one between the Indian film industry and their underworld.

It is indeed ironic that our own music industry, which does not waste any opportunity for piracy bashing, itself gets its music released from a company based in a famous market located in Saddar, Karachi, which was, and is, a proponent of pirated entertainment material not only in Pakistan, but in the Middle East as well. The day that market gets sealed down, the music industry would come down with it. It’s a vicious circle. When you rely on shady corporations to get yourself in the limelight, you can very well face the music with them.

However, it would take a Herculean effort to wipe out that market, the fountain from where piracy sprouts in this part of the world. Why? Well, with the staggering scale of operation involved, it couldn’t really happen without the connivance of higher authorities. And then the question arises, would we be able to live without the hub of piracy. The thing is, once that get eradicated, with no lawful measures in place to import foreign flicks, and our cinemas rotting in peace, this entertainment starved nation would lose one more means of recreation. Are we willing to live without it? The local cinema owners always harp on about piracy taking away their livelihood. Would they be able to fill in the vacuum once piracy gets eliminated?
The local cinema houses, at least those showing international movies, are themselves partially to blame for their present predicament. Hardly have they ever shown a Hollywood movie within a month of its release. There was a time when the media was not as penetrative and people seldom knew when a new movie was actually released. Not anymore. Even before a movie is released, its attractions are being beamed to us via the cable TV. So why would people wait almost half a year to watch a movie when they can do so in a matter of days? This very fact brought about the downfall of a company which was authorized to release Hollywood flicks here. The company took ages to get the movies released here and even then at extortionate rents. No doubt the company now is on the verge of collapse, partly because of piracy, but mostly because of its own inefficacy.

The owner of the company thinks otherwise though admits to sales being almost non-existent. The same is the case with our theatres. Today a decent home theatre system costs less than Rs.50,000. just because advancements in technology are taking place in leaps and bounds, does that mean you ban the entire entertainment appliances because they are taking away a big chink of your business? No. you evolve yourself, something which our rigid cinema owners are reluctant to do and are thus facing the consequences. This trend is not confined to this region only, but is sweeping the entire globe. But theatre elsewhere are not whining or packing up their business. They are facing the music head on. The IMAX theatre system is a result of such changes which has yet appear on the local scene, although it has been around since 1970. With a gigantic screen eight-storey high and 120 ft. wide coupled with a 14,000 watt, 6-channel pure digital sound system, not many people would be able to resist this electrifying experience even if exorbitant rates are charged.

If all this was not enough, a conspiracy theory has been doing the rounds for an entire decade now, that the pirated software available in the Third World are there with the support of their creators, that these corporations want their products to reach the maximum possible audience by fair means or foul. Their aim, the theory continues, is to build up a cheap labour force to be available at their disposal by offering their softwares dirt cheap to the intelligent but cheap wages masses. The way things have gone in the last ten years or so give ample credence to this theory. You only have to look at the large number of expatriate computer specialists hailing from downtrodden countries in the G-8 block to realize that. Even the recent trend of outsourcing the workforce leads to this very theory. Had it not been for piracy, the IT boom may never have taken place in the first place. So, does the end justify the means?

In a country where mugging and vehicle snatching are resignedly accepted as part and parcel of life, where innocent live are taken away for a mere cellphone, how can you expect the natives to look down on piracy – a petty crime in the eyes of the people which at least does not get anyone killed. In fact, it gets the scarce luxuries of life within an affordable range. It’s not to say that this intellectual theft can or should be accepted, but that the menace of piracy is so deeply entrenched in our psyche that unless there is a complete overhaul of attitude in all spheres of life, this apparently ‘lesser evil’ is here to stay for a long time.


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