The Current State of Piracy
The long-standing problem with piracy has not gone unnoticed for the past years, authorities have been working with an aggressive enthusiasm in capturing pirated DVD’s and taking apart the sidewalk shops that sell these bootlegs.
Despite all that… what is the current state of piracy?
Something that started from fake cassette tapes and stolen video captures from local cinemas has moved up into a larger scale. A pirated copy of every commercial piece of multimedia can now be found in the sidewalks or the “DVD black market”: mp3’s, music and video files, from local to foreign TV dramas, talk shows, reality show episodes, movies that were first released in some countries but are yet to be released here. Even computer programs and applications, game versions, audio books and e-books have become more at hand and accessible through piracy. Nowadays, it may even be said that the pirated video collection could be more extensive than those found in the local record bars and legal video shops. ‘Hard to find’ videos like sports events, concert collections, foreign language films and TV series not sold locally can easily be bought from the neighborhood pirated DVD kiosk.
Even the quality of pirated multimedia products has significantly improved, moving up from the haphazardly captured videos in the movie house with the top of the heads of the viewers showing at the bottom of the screen and the hoot calls heard in the background to the subtitled and multi-language enabled DVD rips.
The grip of this resilient industry only seems to tighten and its shadow over the entertainment industry grows bigger by the day.
