Forums > General > General Forum

TomG

Oct 10, 2003, 7:33 AM

Post #1 of 4 (893 views)

Shortcut

pirated CD's in the mercados

Can't Post | Private Reply

This is too much. The spirit of Mexican mercados is marching north.

Here's a NYTimes link to an article about a flea market among many in the USA where vendors are selling pirated CD's.

http://www.nytimes.com/...on/10PIRA.html?8hpib

I talked to a 20 something pirate CD vendor in Xalapa last spring who has a MA degree in Chemical Engineering. Professional opportunities are not so hot for him so he lives off of his business, which, he says, pays more than Chemical Engineering, if he had the work. Anyway, he told me about members of a locally famous group who buy CD's of their groups' CD's from him when they want to give them as gifts to their friends.

Scratch around Mexico and you often find professionally trained people singing in restaurants, running tiendas, running errands, or anything else. Sad.

Carron

Oct 10, 2003, 6:58 PM

Post #2 of 4 (830 views)

Shortcut

Re: [TomG] pirated CD's in the mercados

Can't Post | Private Reply

Likewise, pirated computer programs. There is a joke here in Mexico that there is only one licensed copy of Windows 2000 in all of Mexico. And everyone has a copy!

Oct 11, 2003, 8:48 AM

Post #3 of 4 (794 views)

Shortcut

Re: [TomG] pirated CD's in the mercados

Can't Post | Private Reply

Quote

TomG writes:
This is too much. The spirit of Mexican mercados is marching north....

That's what I'd definitely call a stretch for a Mexican tie-in. Open-market sales of pirated music and computer software is nothing new in the US, nor is it an import from Mexico, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe, the latter three of which have countries which make Mexico/Mexicans look like rank amateurs in the pirate business. Even long before the existence of music CD's you'd find boxes of pirated and sampler (now called "mix") cassettes and 8-track tapes (remember [ka CHUNK] those?) both on open display and beneath tables in US flea markets, and if you entered a computer "swap meet" in the US in the 80's you'd find that over three-quarters of the software was pirated (and some extremely professionally packaged).

One "plus" for the Mexican pirate market is that in comparison to Southeast Asia it's both less developed and less recognized and the US Customs Service is less on the lookout for imports (both commercial and individual) of pirated CDs (both software and music) which are subject to confiscation and destruction. Mexico also has easier access to Region 1 DVDs and a bigger internal market for DVD players with Region 1 capabilities (although Mexico is in Zone 4) making copying of Region 1 DVDs more of interest, although this is hardly a consideration with the speed and ease a DVD can be copied these days.

In my personal case, the Mexican pirate music CD business has actually benefited the commercial recording industry, albeit in a non-proportional fashion. During trips to Mexico I'll try to pop into a Tianguis and pick up half a dozen or more "mix" CDs which I'll listen to at my leisure and identify groups or artists whose music I like, and whose "real" disks I'll then buy. The mix disks are also popular with a couple of friends who like virologists or geneticists analyze the different tracks for distinctive bit patterns that the copying process (particularly when an intermediary format like MP3 or WMA is used) leaves behind, and thereby identifies the lineage and to a degree origin of the copy.

(This post was edited by ET on Oct 11, 2003, 8:50 AM)

jrice

Oct 11, 2003, 9:14 PM

Post #4 of 4 (753 views)

Shortcut

Re: [TomG] pirated CD's in the mercados

Can't Post | Private Reply

Charles Dickens' first visit to the United States was prompted by his complaints about copyright violations which were then Malaysia-like common in the Land of the Free.

Since that moment, when there were almost no copyright protections, we have steadily expanded them to the point where a work created in the 1920s remains commercial property now.

As I recall, the first books were copied and freely distributed, if laboriously and heroically, by hand. I doubt many of the founding fathers of reproduction asked asked for permission to print or that the authors of the true sources of Western culture, asked for direct recompense.

We are talking about historically new and invented concepts. That does not mean they are invalid, not in any sense. Many of us get paid for intellectual property and its residuals. Destroying that could destroy or at least restrain much intellectual activity, or at least drive said intellectuals back into the hands of rich robber barons or plastics stamping factories.

But it does suggest there is at least a debate about where it starts and ends. As does the fact that the value of much of the material copied would be degraded, if it had any to begin with, by the diminution of distribution. Or that material essential to understanding the history of the American people could easily be repressed for trival commercial or legal reasons. Most records are not available, despite sometimes great historical and anthropolitical value.

Did you know that Kate "God Bless America" Smith also recorded "That's Why Darkies Were Born?" I doubt the company that owns her rights would want you to know that, much less to hear it and to think about what it says about her or her time -- a time now under copyright, of course.

Perhaps it should be forever repressed. I'm OK, You're OK from now onward.

Mexico is a sort of warmbed of copyright piracy. It does not in any remote sense compare to some countries in Asia, where you can sometimes get pirate DVDs that are of a higher quality than the commercial versions released months later. John Dvorak recently wrote a column (PC Magazine) suggesting that Microsoft winked at universal piracy in some technologically adept nations in order to protect market share globally vis a vis free software.

"Mexican" markets seem exotic to us because Mexico is often the only other country we know. But such souks are the rule, not the exception, thoughout human history as well as current human experience. In the United States, they were, too. Now they've been bleached, dried and enriched with infusions of money and pretention and we call them malls.