Pirates of the Crimean

*Note: I realize that Crimea is part of Ukraine, not Russia. But it's close enough, and it scans.

We students in the United States think that we're pretty hip to copyright piracy. When Napster came out, we thought that was pretty cool. We were pretty sure it was illegal, but we were willing to overlook that point because we really wanted to download "It's My Life" by Bon Jovi but were much too ashamed to buy the whole CD. (Note: I did, in fact, buy the whole CD, and I really should have just thrown my morals to the wind and Napstered, because the greater crime was the amount of money Bon Jovi charged me for what was, objectively speaking, with the exception of the one single, a genuine piece of certifide horse farts.) Napster was shut down, and we were all feeling very righteous, so we made each other mix CDs from our Ipods (those of us who have Ipods, anways; the rest of us just latched on for the free booty) and, once we got to college, dropped the subtle veneer of legality and flatly refused to listen to or watch anything that wasn't burned off of the computer. We think we've got this piracy thing down.

We have no idea.

In the United States, we are but infants playing with the shadows cast by the fires of illegal downloading in the cave of copyright infringement. (I don't know if Plato ever dreamed up a specific cave of copyright infringement, but I think he would see the applicability of the The Republic to my desire to watch Clerks II without, you know, paying for it.) The Russians are the ones fueling the fire with copies of popular DVDs and old Metallica albums. In the United States, we don't really have much of a black market for CDs and DVDs, excepting exchanges of mix CDs to cement the friendships of adolescent girls (which I do not disapprove of, as such CDs constitute the bulk of my less-than-extensive music collection). Most US piracy takes place in the digital world. Russia hasn't really got a black market either, because to me, the term "black market" implies some amount of secrecy or mysteriousness, preferably involving nighttime in a dark alley. I would describe the distribution of pirated goods in Russia as more of a hot pink market. On a scale of one to subtle and hard to track down, the hot pink market doesn't really register. Most of what's sold in "legitimate" stores never saw the inside of the distributor's warehouse, while Metro stations and underground crosswalks in St. Petersburg are viewed less as a part of public transportation than as extra space to hawk Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolow, the Russian dub (and yes, my host father owns this DVD), without the threat of being rained on and having the worth of your goods reduced from criminally cheap to nothing at all.

It's not that Russia doesn't have anti-piracy laws, it's just that the laws have two problems: 1) they suck and 2) they are directly antithetical to the interests of the people who's job it is to enforce them--the police--and the Russian police are not generally noted for selflessness in the line of duty. Give policeman Boris the choice closing down the local metro market and explaining to his family why they can't by movies anymore or purchasing Pirates of the Caribbean II for $2 the day it comes out in theatres, and I guarantee you that there will be Johnny Depp in the Boris household tonight. As for the actual piracy code itself...it's more like guidelines, really.

Russia, of course, insists that it's doing something about the problem. In a June edition of the St. Petersburg Times (article here), I read that the government would be shutting down all of the metro markets in St. Petersburg by July 1. While it's nice that the government told the press, I don't think they told to the metro markets, because it's been a few weeks, and for a market that has been officially closed, business is good.

Fun note that is really a continuation of the post but doesn't exactly fit: This post doesn't even begin to cover the amount of things are are available in the hot pink market. Software, CDs, and DVDs are only the beginning. In Russia, it is also possible to purchase a degree and transcript from the university of your choice (I see people standing around advertising for this service), and a new company has started producing pirated vacations. If you can't find the time in your schedule or the funds in your bank account to take that trip to Bora Bora you've been dreaming about, you can still convince your friends you've gone with mail-order plane tickets, pictures, receipts, and souvenirs. Try to buy sudafed and you may end up with sugar pills, and Russians would just laugh at you for being gullible as to expect, you know, medication. Then they will feed you something foul and homemade and claim that you will feel better, but this too, will be a lie. For a relatively complete and fairly amusing account of what you can get off the hot pink market in Russia, I recommend the St. Petersburg Times article creatively entitled "Fakes, Fakes, and More Fakes."