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Monday, February 16, 2004
Amante: Pirate calling, cloud-obsessed
By ISOLDE D. AMANTE
READER, I don’t know what came over me.
After all, I pay my taxes, vote regularly and brake for small animals. I even refused to bribe technicians when the car was up for its smoke emissions test, and, having passed, I drove away smug and sanctimonious, leaving failed Explorers and Expeditions in my toxin-free wake.
But over the weekend, downtown, some nameless pirate tried my backbone. I would have won too. But “Blue” stood in my way.
Krzysztof Kieslowski, this is all your fault. If you and your distributors had made your movie cheaper and easier to find, I could have purchased the authorized DVD and survived with my conscience intact. Instead, what began as a downtown stroll quickly turned into a major movie-buying binge, and I didn’t even have depression to blame.
I could of course point to my friends Pubs and Carmel, purveyors of my pirated discs before I began buying these myself. But since they supplied “Lost in Translation” and the pleasures of pirated subtitles, it would be ungrateful to heap the blame on them. (And, oh, those subtitle translations. Like haiku! Something as pedestrian as “I am Colin, god of sex” is transformed into “I am calling, cloud obsessed.”)
Someone should alert the presidential aspirants, ask them how they intend to stop a business that costs Hollywood movie moguls some $2.5 billion in lost revenues every year—revenue that goes instead to the video parlors of Calcutta and the makeshift stalls of Colon.
Someone should make a case for how video piracy has driven half of Philippine tinseldom into politics instead, with Fernando Poe Jr. saying he can serve Cavite faithfully and well, “because I’ve made more than 20 movies there.”
Someone should raise public awareness about the optical media bill, which President Arroyo is supporting because, she says, government has lost up to P1 billion on account of video piracy.
It will not be me, with my puny backbone and worse technological skills.
Better individuals have tried and failed. Movie distributors have tried everything, from content-scrambling to a coding system that, in theory, makes Japanese or European DVD players unable to read discs bought in the United States.
Recently in New York, Sulaiman and Mohamed Bah were sentenced to 46 months in prison each, after a raid on their storeroom in 1999 yielded thousands of pirated discs. (Too bad they focused their skills on “American Pie”, “The Mummy” and “Bowfinger.”)
Yet thousands of their cohorts continue to ply their trade. That same year, the Sunday Times of London reported that a bootleg copy of “The World is Not Enough” was made available for free over the Web, even before it could be released in theaters worldwide.
Whether they do it for profit or out of pride in their techno-savvy skills, the suppliers of mass piracy accomplish something that many global corporations sometimes overlook: they make the market work for consumers, not corporations, first. For once, the overtaxed, inconvenienced consumer is king.
(E-mail: ida@sunstar.com.ph)
(February 16, 2004 issue)
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