Pirates

When I got here in 97 the city was dotted with kiosks selling audio cassettes, usually with two albums on them and with a photocopied inlay card full of typos. They cost a dollar or thereabouts, it was hard to tell with the rouble standing at 87 trillion to the dollar or whatever it was. Only def jam records, for some reason, sold the originals at a discount price, maybe double the pirate tapes, but with real inlay cards and lyrics and all the usual paraphernalia of legality. So you would buy those because they were cheap as hell even at two times the price.

 CDs were around too, and so cheap that I actually bought my first CD player in Moscow. Again 1 or 2 dollars would get you a CD with two albums on it.

One day I went to Gorbushka, a huge open air market in the west of the city, and found everything I had ever imagined in pirate form, CD’s, tapes, software, pornography, probably people if I had dug deep enough. And that market ran and grew for years, going there with 100 dollars would see you coming home with a sports bag full of goodies.

At the time it was possible to buy legal stuff in a few places but it cost about 25$ for a CD, the original rip off price from the record company plus the 40% added on for all imported stuff, it wasn’t a realistic option for a city full of relatively poor people.

Then came the MP3 CD, and the MP3 DVD, the former gave you all of the Beatles on two CDs the latter would contain the complete works of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.

And it wasn’t just the obvious stuff; I found pirated complete works of the Swans, The House of Love, Nick Drake and dozens of other less popular artists.

  At the time the internet was offering Kazaa, Napster, Gnutella and Edonkey, and they worked, but on a dial up modem it was simpler just to buy.

 I was around this time I talked to an employee of Microsoft who was involved in some audit of the company’s products and he told me that nearly all of the computers owned by state organization were using pirated software, which was a handy glimpse into the authorities’ level of concern over copyright issues.

Now and then some delegation from international copyright protection organisations would visit and all of the city centre CD places would close until they had left the city.

  Then torrents arrived and it was all over bar the shouting. Everyone was using them, and the fear that lots of my western friends felt concerning the illegality of it all was totally absent here, and still is.

I-Tunes? You must be having a joke?

Now the latest film is on your hard drive in 10 minutes, more obscure stuff takes longer. But you can get early 70s Mike Leigh TV stuff, yesterdays HBO schedule, anything the BBC makes and every film that it occurs to you to want. Plus software, games, porn again of course, and, even with half a brain, there are no viruses etc to worry about.

 As a result all the other ways of selling this stuff have faded away. And, just 10 years too late, the majors have begun to grasp the basic rules of pricing for the Russian market, so if by some freak of chance you decided to go legal, it wouldn’t cost anything like what it used to.

I imagine anyone living in China, Much of Africa, all of eastern Europe and South America could tell a similar story. The morality of it all I leave to better minds than my own.