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Counterfeiting has spread in recent years from luxury goods such as branded handbags and watches to cigarettes and drugs, including Viagra. The following article presents an alternative and what some would consider an irreverent view of 'piracy', which is especially rampant in the South.

by Jeremy Seabrook

The Industry Trust for Intellectual Property Awareness in Britain has published a report which estimates that pirated DVDs make a profit of more than sterling pounds 500 million a year. In the United States, the movie industry lost $3.5 billion in 2002. The same year, sales of illegal CDs were worth $4.6 billion. Madonna and Mariah Carey are the most pirated artistes.

In March this year, Senator Patrick Leahy, speaking before a Judiciary Committee Hearing, quoted the Business Software Alliance estimate that pirated software cost the US economy 118,000 jobs and $5.7 billion in lost wages in 2000. As much as 42% of the world's software is illegal. Between 5% and 7% of trade worldwide - that is $400 billion a year - is lost to illegal knock-off producers.

The International Chamber of Commerce states that counterfeiting has spread in recent years from luxury goods such as Louis Vuitton handbags and Cartier watches to drugs, including Viagra. The most widely traded counterfeit product is cigarettes: recently Philip Morris agreed to pay $1.25 billion to the EU to help stop smuggling or counterfeiting of cigarettes. It estimates that 1/2 of the 232 billion cigarettes sold under its brand names in the EU are counterfeit. In 2003, Nintendo says it lost about $720 million in sales to counterfeit goods.

Executives of transnational companies regularly enunciate grave warnings as to the effects of theft, piracy and infringement of the ownership of images, signs, logos and acronyms. The activities of unscrupulous imitators, of copy-cats, of forgers and fraudsters of every kind represent a threat to the stability of the world trading system. There has been an attempt by the industries involved to undermine the idea that these are harmless rip-offs, and stigmatise them as practices of organised crime. They have sought to associate piracy with trafficking in drugs, human beings and terrorism.

There may be some special pleading in their efforts to paint the theft of intellectual property as a heinous crime, since its purpose is to impose the laws of the market on culture - what was traditionally freely given and spontaneous, the celebration of human societies. The experience of pirates in India suggests they have no more sinister purpose than making quick and easy money.

India is now a major centre for the creation and diffusion of fake branded goods, pirated merchandise, music and films, much of it for home consumption. Many are small-time operators, models of enterprise, ingenuity and creativity, operating in interstitial spaces of the growing cities.

It is true that much of their labour is illicit under rules drawn up by the World Trade Organisation, particularly those designed to protect patents, and trade-related intellectual property rights, but far from funding terrorism or drugs, these occupations may well also be a means of preventing greater mischief than piracy and counterfeiting.

Traders in bogus wares are highly conspicuous on the streets of the towns and cities of the South: selling perfume the colour of urine samples in plastic flacons or watches encrusted with false jewels; branded fashion-wear, handbags, accessories and jewellery from the most celebrated workshops and ateliers of Europe and America are to be had for a hundred rupees on makeshift stalls in Kolkata and Delhi.

Films not yet released by Bollywood, CDs which have yet to leave the factories, the designs of tomorrow or the day after, defy time with their premature appearance among the streetwise sales personnel. These, alert and vigilant, are always ready to pack up everything in the blanket laid out on the sidewalk and disappear into the dark alleys behind the principal thoroughfare if the police, or other supervisory agencies, should organise a raid on their illegal activities.

From time to time TV shows images of bulldozers destroying mountains of confiscated CDs and DVDs, or the authorities breaking into some clandestine factory and smashing the products with sledgehammers. This is pure spectacle; it scarcely interferes with the work of piracy.

The pirates are producing material for consumers who cannot afford the prices which the original articles command. In urban centres, whole new populations are gaining access to a counterfeit world from which they ought, by virtue of the slenderness of their means, to be excluded. This is globalisation from the bottom up. And it is strictly prohibited.

The manufacturers and disseminators of these stolen goods expect to be denounced by aggrieved and virtuous transnational companies, Western governments and international institutions.

The clandestine entrepreneurs are not unaware of the irony that much of what they are pirating itself constitutes a world of counterfeit and illusion, of manufactured dreams, synthetic sentiment and carefully crafted deception. They are working in the shadow of a meretricious culture of mendacity and fraud. Small-scale robbery in broad daylight is, apparently, a greater evil than a systematic misrepresentation of the world by infotainment conglomerates, whose business is with icons, brands, images, fantasy and perpetual escape.

The unauthorised publications, the issuing and distribution of false market goods subvert the value of the original products. This process defies all the efforts of the instruments of globalisation to control and impose order on the chaotic and deranged world they have themselves created.

The big companies want deregulation for themselves, but an ever-sharper regulation of those who mimic or copy their goods. The free market must be protected against anarchic practitioners who call into question its basic tenets.

After all, the desirable goods associated with development are essentially aspirational: they are about privilege, and access must be reserved for those who have the money to pay for them. Otherwise, all value disappears, the brand is disgraced, the logo tarnished, and a world which invests such phenomenal sums in promoting abstractions, risks becoming meaningless.

In places where traditional artisans have lost markets, where demand for ancient crafts and skills has dried up, where renewable artefacts and objects of simple daily use have been usurped by mass-produced goods, the sly subversion of global consumerism may be read as the revenge of those who have been marginalised and degraded by the compulsions of the global market. The growing profession of fakers recruits itself from the increasing army of the underemployed and disemployed.

In every big city in the South, from Dhaka to Lagos, from Sao Paulo to Mumbai, thousands of graduates roam the streets, carrying with them a list of their qualifications, their MBAs, their Master's in this or that branch of a commerce which has failed to employ them; people who have been thrown out of work by the privatisations of publicly owned industries and the demolition of welfare structures.

These have become the new entrepreneurs of the twilight areas that compete with secretive Economic Priority Zones, the counterfeiters and mimics of products, which they bring to the starvelings of globalisation. However much the official owners of intellectual property may deplore their activities, without such occupations, there is no doubt they would be engaged on even-more disruptive social activities, as indeed, many already do, preferring the vocation of drugs, crime and even easier money than the laborious efforts of faking - the creative mimesis of globalism.

Electronic piracy, like the production of false luxury goods, goes a long way to reconciling the non-participants in the global economy to their fate. If their activities were effectively policed, there would be a huge release of energy into far more noxious anti-social occupations than the tribute they pay to the system from which they have been through no fault of their own, exiled.

How can a global economy, so much of which devotes itself to appearances, images and symbols, a world of inauthenticity and falsehood, complain about fakes, rip-offs and forgeries? When the injured and humiliated workers in the sub-contracted hell-holes of global brand names are used up in the production of football shirts, toys or trainers, underpaid, locked into factories at night, watched by CC-TV when they visit the lavatory, sometimes beaten or raped or overseers, who is going to grieve over the dented profits of global deception? When the faux-monnayeurs, the institutionalised purveyors of illusion, rule the world, their imitators, struggling at the edge of material survival, represent a subversive reality of which they understand nothing.

- Third World Network Features

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