Mexico recently made headlines when it was included in the U.S. Trade Representative’s “Notorious Markets List,” which identifies markets around the world that harm business through intellectual property rights infringement. It was stated that the main Mexican markets selling illegal goods are the Mercado Tepito in Mexico City and Guadalajara’s San Juan de Dios.
According to the Chicago Tribune, as far back as 2005 the U.S. film industry “lost” 483 million dollars in that year alone because of Mexican movie piracy. In 2009, the Mexican Film and Music Protection Association estimated that nine out of every ten peliculas sold in Mexico are pirated. Since then, the Mexican government has tried everything from raiding tianguis to broadcasting melodramatic spots proclaiming that buying a pirated DVD is exactly the same as stealing.
But to no avail. Illegal music, movies, computer programs, video games and brand-name knockoffs are as popular as ever. Why so?
I put that question to a few people I know. Several strongly felt that buying bootleg disks was wrong and said they would never do it. Others gave me answers which I felt were thought-provoking.
Said the British owner of a successful business in Guadalajara: “We are told again and again that buying pirated disks is stealing from the artists who made them. However, if you ask the opinion of Mexican artists, you may get surprising answers. Those I talked to felt that buying pirated CDs and DVDs was quite all right, that art should be shared. If you want a higher quality version of the work, you pay more and for a lower-quality (pirated) version, you pay less. The real question, I think, is whether anti-piracy laws are protecting the artist or enriching the film and music industries.”
Next I asked a Mexican doctor, highly specialized in her field. “If Mexico were a country where everyone had equal opportunities, for example business owners, I’d say piracy was wrong. But, unfortunately, businesses can’t grow here because of bureaucracy and corruption. Piracy helps give us access to different technologies, music and films because they are cheaper. The average Mexican doesn’t earn enough to buy technology and entertainment at world standard prices. If the situation were better, I’d be against piracy, but the way things are, I’d say piracy is not so bad.”
Doing the math
Note that a recently released movie DVD may cost 250 pesos at MixUp or Gandhi while a bootleg version may sell for 20 pesos at a tianguis, and that the minimum daily (not hourly) wage in Mexico is 68.28 pesos (4.46 U.S. dollars). A ticket to watch a movie at a local theater can run from 45 to 100 pesos, meaning that many people have to spend a full day’s pay just to see a film.
Ethnomusicologist Jack Bishop argues that U.S. music industry executives engage in price gouging by selling music to developing countries at the same price as in the advanced industrial world. “When you have a predatory price policy incompatible with the economic reality of a country, then you are simply paving the way for piracy,” he says.
Says Julie A. Murphy Erfani in her book “Crime and Violence in the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands”: “Piracy flourishes in Mexico, in part, because of North America’s maldistributed wealth that cripples Mexican consumers compared with their U.S. and Canadian counterparts.”
If wealth inequality underpins the piracy problem, Mexico is in very bad shape because, Mexico consistently ranks among the 20 countries in the world with the worst inequality. In Mexico, the top 10 percent make over 30 times more than the poorest 10 percent.
BitTorrent
What if you can’t find a film among the 250-peso DVDs at Sanborns, or even for 20 pesos at the local tianguis. Welcome to the world of BitTorrents.
As most under-30s already know, BitTorrent or torrent is a system for downloading big files quickly and efficiently. Instead of receiving that file slowly from one source on the internet, a torrent connects you to dozens or even hundreds of computers which have a copy of it and – believe it or not – all of them start sending you different bits and pieces of the file simultaneously via a torrent-downloading program like Tixati (free from tixati.com).
An example of a torrent-download site is YTS.to, the fifth most popular film downloading site on the web. YTS has a catalog of 3,948 films and gets ten million visitors per month. The biggest such site, called The Pirate Bay, is rumored to receive “hundreds of millions” of visits per month – when it is not shut down, of course. Films can be downloaded in about half an hour from either web site and there is no charge for the service.
Once a video is downloaded, a player is needed to watch it. While Windows Media Player is very limited as to what kind of files it can play, Media Player Classic Home Cinema plays just about anything and costs nothing. With the help of an HDMI cable, your computer can be connected to a big plasma monitor and it’s time to break out the popcorn.
If you feel guilty about illegally downloading a movie or song – prosecution for such an act is almost unheard of anywhere – take heart from a study by the charity Oxfam, which notes that by 2016 one percent of the world’s population will own more than half the earth’s wealth. I suppose the rest of us will have to get by on pirated movies.