Why poor countries lead the world in piracy By Cory Doctorow

 Beating copyright infringement in the third world could be as simple as making products affordable.

                                                                                                     Photograph: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP

A shopper looks at pirate software in Bangladesh.

 The developing world has plenty of problems, but few are as important as piracy. Or rather, "piracy", by which I mean: "Trade reps from rich countries complaining loudly about copyright infringement and demanding that poor countries re-organise their domestic priorities around preventing unauthorised copying at any expense, threatening trade sanctions and worse for the recalcitrant."

 Social scientist and Social Science Research Council director Joe Karaganis oversaw the production of the report Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, billed as "the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia". This weighty, 440-page report took 35 researchers three years to produce, and it is a careful, thoroughly documented rebuttal of practically everything you've ever heard or read about copyright infringement in the poor world.

 Media Piracy's core thesis is simple: people in the poor world don't pay for software, games, music and movies because these goods cost too much. Whereas a DVD here might cost you an hour's wage, the same DVD in a poor country could cost a day's work, or a week's, or even more. In poor markets where legitimate media costs the same (in relative terms) as it does in rich markets, the amount of licit purchasing is about the same.

 But that's not what the media companies say they believe. In their official narrative – bolstered by a long line of studies with undocumented methodologies and assumptions – is that poor countries simply lack a "culture of copyright" that can be reinforced through education and enforcement.

 Karganis and co have much to say on this score. They document the way that the airwaves and newspapers in poor countries are dominated by the official, Hollywood view of piracy, presented uncritically and at length. The message is even integrated into the school curriculum through official teaching units produced by American entertainment conglomerates and given to teachers to be delivered verbatim to their students.

 On the enforcement side, entertainment companies often secure a kind of rough, streamlined justice that allows them to race to the head of the justice line, pushing past criminal and civil cases of much larger magnitude. They get their own police forces tasked to them, and their own special high-grade punishments that treat offences against them as inherently graver than offences against local firms and people.

 The years have flown past, the millions have been spent, the message has been diffused, the laws have been rewritten, and yet the objective observers behind Media Piracy see no sign of the entertainment industry's "culture of copyright".

 So why do it at all? Karganis and co explain that the entertainment industry's dilemma comes, fundamentally, from wanting to have its cake and eat it too. The entertainment industry can't afford to set its price to locally appropriate equivalents. Not because it can't profitably sell software or games or other intangibles at much lower prices – after all, the incremental cost of a new copy of Windows or Toy Story or Spore is the pennies necessary to transfer it over the net or burn it onto a disc. But if you could fly to Sri Lanka or Morocco or Mexico and buy a legit, licensed copy of Windows for a few pounds, you might be tempted to pick up a couple of dozen copies for your friends, or for the local car-boot sale. The entertainment industry fears this kind of arbitrage, so it sells its commodity goods at luxury prices in countries full of starving people and acts alarmed and hurt when people choose not to pay full freight.

 But by asking taxpayers – here in the rich world and also in the poor world – to foot the bill for trade sanctions, enforcement, new civil and criminal penalties, even global treaties like ACTA, the entertainment industry can still get a profit out of the poorest people in the world by externalising the costs and reaping whatever sliver of legit market they can drag out of the poor world by brute force.

 As good a read as Media Piracy is, many people might find the idea of getting to grips with more than 400 pages of research at home somewhat daunting. Luckily, there's an alternative: Karaganis is on tour with his report, heading to Brussels where he'll be presenting the work to the EU. On the way, he's stopping in London to give a free lecture on Wednesday morning, presented by the Open Rights Group and the LSE.

 This report and its researchers are rare examples of academic rigour in a world of special pleading and cooked industry statistics. Every one of us pays for the result of those bad figures, and we owe it to ourselves to become familiar with the objective facts underlying the aggressive lobbying and propaganda.

©guardian.co.uk