The Philippine Online Chronicles

This whole Ronald Llamas pirated DVD-buying “scandal” has been fascinating to say the least (and at least 10 times more fascinating than the Renato Corona impeachment trial). Just recently, Presidential adviser Llamas “apologized” to President Aquino for being photographed by an enterprising tabloid journalist as he was buying pirated DVDs in a Quezon City shopping center. He made this apology while simultaneously insisting that he did not violate any laws, which makes you wonder what it is exactly he’s apologizing for. Vendors of pirated DVDs, for one, can’t see what’s wrong with this. “Bakit? Nagnakaw ba siya?,” says a vendor in a news article. “Maliit lang naman na bagay iyan. Ang daming mas mabigat na problema.” And of course what’s an embarrassingly comical news story without a comment for the one and only Joseph Estrada? “Hindi naman nagnakaw iyan eh,” he declared. “Bumili pa nga eh.”

Intellectual Property Piracy is such a sketchy issue worldwide. In the Philippines, it’s downright weird. We know piracy is illegal, our government tells us so. Yet, entire families subsist on income generated by the hawking of pirated DVDs, music CDs, video games, software, and illegal downloads. Everyone and everyone’s daughter, son, friend, and suking manikurista owns something pirated. In one of the greatest mysteries of life, despite everyone knowing all about Circle C, MetroWalk, Makati Cinema Square, Greenhills, St. Francis Square, and every piracy center in the country, the Optical Media Board doesn’t seem to know where they are. Yet, this hardly seems to matter anymore since we don’t even need to go to those places; we can download anything from our computers now. For free.

Three fundamental things are happening here all at the same time: (1) we know piracy is illegal, (2) we decry it in mainstream media (with the exception of a few vendors and ex-presidents, apparently), (3) and yet we fully support it privately because we don’t see anything too deplorable about it for us to feel guilty enough. And this is the main problem about piracy as viewed in this country: it seems like a non-crime.

The commerce of art

How wrong is piracy, exactly? We don’t condemn it the same way we do genocide, corruption, or child slavery, and the reason is obvious: the “victims” of piracy are corporations or people who are already rich and don’t really need our help that much. It’s hard to feel sorry for Bill Gates, for instance, when buying a pirated copy of his software off a sidewalk won’t exactly force him to sell one of his mansions. But when the argument shifts to: “well, what about the artists?”, then it gets more interesting.

In basically the entirety of pre-modern history, art was never a lucrative vocation. Artists were usually mentioned in the same breath as vagrants and prostitutes. There were some exceptions, of course, such as William Shakespeare, who was only the greatest and most successful playwright in history, but even he wasn’t nearly as rich in Elizabethan England as Katy Perry is in 2012. This is because artists in the pre-modern world, particularly performers, earned money only through public performance.

In the 20^th century, something changed: pop culture happened. For the first time after centuries of small-scale performances, art was now consumed in a ridiculously wide – or “popular” – scale. What made this possible was mass media, which took the form of three things: radio, television, and mass-produced recordings. For music, it was the records that made musicians “pop stars;” radio existed practically for promotional use only. For film stars, you could only watch them in movie theaters. When home video became possible, it was mostly harmless because large-scale mass production was still inaccessible. That is until digital technology not only made it accessible; it made it better.

Despite international piracy, pop stars and film stars are still rich, thanks to innovations such as the iTunes Store. But I’m not sure they’re making much money here in the Philippines like they used to. And I’m pretty sure I don’t know anyone who “buys” music through the iTunes Store.

Paradigm lost

I’ve been a music collector ever since I was old enough to understand how “buying stuff” works. Some of my fondest memories from my late teens to my early 20s involve me skimming shelves in CD Warehouse (located in the old Greenbelt basement), Tower Records (especially the one in Glorietta 4, which regularly played indie music), Music One (in Greenbelt 3), and going to Groove Nation (a tiny indie music import store in Makati that lasted for about three years) to excitedly claim imported CDs I ordered. Now all of those stores have closed down. Each time I see one of those branches abandoned or relegated into a makeshift warehouse (like the former Tower Records/Music One in Quezon Avenue), I feel a very specific nostalgic sadness.

There was a romance in shopping for CDs that is just totally absent in internet downloading; it was a ritual, like going to church, and the smell of all those new CDs filled you with a palpable excitement. But here’s a confession: I honestly think the current setup is better. Not more romantic; just better. I can download entire albums and entire discographies in a matter of hours for free. Whenever I want to listen to a song I do not own for some reason, all I need to do is to find it on Youtube. I can continue to collect music at a faster rate, through more accessible means, and more importantly, at virtually no cost.

It’s easy to say that Pinoys embrace piracy because we are used to bending rules; that we are a nation of fixers, loose traffic laws, and “under-the-table” transactions. In this case, however, I feel like there’s something more that doesn’t get talked about enough.

I know piracy is illegal, but I’m starting to wonder how “wrong” it really is.

The past is the future

The reality is that we used to live in a world where corporations had the technological monopoly on the distribution of art. In this setup, the idea of “intellectual property” is natural and logical.

But we also used to live in a world where distribution of art was free; and it was called “oral tradition,” which was how epics like “Beowulf” and “Ang Biag ni Lam-Ang” were promulgated. In this world, water was still free and was not sold through water purifying stations and “intellectual property” did not exist. Ideas and information flowed freely, like H20.

This is what I am reminded of every time I think about the impact of digital technology and the internet, which happen to be two irrevocable facts of life we can no longer circumvent. Ideas are democratized once again, freed from the constraints of commerce and social class; you don’t have to be filthy-rich to watch rare, critically-acclaimed movies or to amass a huge music collection. Even artists are going back to their roots, in a way. Local bands do not earn as much through royalties anymore and rely on live shows more than ever before (and product endorsements; Ely Buendia, I’m looking at you); harkening back to those days when artists earned their keep through public performance and not recorded performance. We exchange works of art freely everyday, like old times, only now we do it at a rate that would’ve made Beethoven an international rock star in the 19^th century. I can’t help but think – are things really screwed up now or did things just go back to normal?

Maybe the world is so much bigger now that monetizing consumption of art has become a necessity. But I also wonder if digital technology has already changed the way things work and if commerce and art are still in a state of denial. I wonder if the existing paradigm of copyright laws and ownership of ideas is the one that is unnatural and artificial. I wonder if piracy will eventually be remembered in history as a transitional period, when the world hadn’t figured out yet how to adapt to new technology, and therefore used laws to cover up the gaps in comprehension. I wonder if, by embracing piracy, Pinoys are actually adapting in advance to a future where international commerce and laws are finally fully adjusted to new technology, a future where the pursuit of knowledge becomes truly and genuinely free.

Now there’s a thought: Pinoys at the forefront of social evolution. It’s got a nice ring to it; certainly better than Pinoys as pirates.

Photo: “Guilty” by Lauri Rantala, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

Alex Almario has won a Nick Joaquin Literary Award for his fiction; his reality, though, is a lot more mundane as a Junior Creative Director in his day job and a writer of essays in his own blog, Colonial Mental. He also recently just realized that twitter exists, so you can follow him there @ColonialMental.