by
Prasad Krishna
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published
Jan 22, 2010
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last modified
Aug 04, 2011 04:35 AM
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filed under:
Piracy,
Intellectual Property Rights
The word ‘piracy’ assumes negative connotations. In the imagination of an ordinary middle class urban Indian it is linked directly to the informal economy, crime and even terrorism. But the ‘pirated good’, that is, the ‘optical disc’ is not seen with a similar perception. The ‘CD’ is the access key to the cultural wealth of music, cinema and software contained inside. This paradox is created in the sphere of information and knowledge that is created by anti-piracy agencies using extensive reports and statistics that are published every year. These statistics often have a tendency to create a feeling of ‘shock and awe’ for the readers that see these numbers splashed across headlines of news and media reports. Till 2004, the creation of numbers conjuring losses up to millions was mostly the domain of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which is now supplemented by reports commissioned to consultancy groups like McKinsey, PWC, and Ernst & Young. This article by Siddharth Chadha traces a few reports that have come to become popular benchmarks of piracy in the past few years.
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