Piracy

This paper looks at the phenomenon of media piracy on the internet and in real space. As I live in the Philippines, I will focus on the piracy here, but my remarks will not be limited to the local situation. I will look at the phenomenon of piracy as such and try and outline some observations about how piracy works. First of all, I will look at piracy as a means of distributing films, and - drawing on interviews with some traders of pirated media material - on how the piracy market functions in the Philippines. I will also discuss the effect that the access to quality films has on the local film culture and media literacy in general and on the teaching of film in particular. Then I will discuss the unprecedented rise of media piracy in the last couple of years as one of the most prominent issues of the "digital millennium". The "Pirates of the New World Image Order" (Patricia R. Zimmermann) are not only piggy-backing on the new globalized economy that has arisen due to the world-wide deregulation and liberalization of markets in the 1980s and 1990s. They are also profiteers of a number of technological developments in the computer sciences such as the international expansion of the Internet, which has challenged traditional notions of copy right and intellectual property on a very fundamental level.