Pirates beware

Yesterday, I posted my Quiapo lakwatcha last June 12. Today, I read from an online newspaper that government agencies have destroyed P10M-worth of pirated products, including DVDs.

The crackdown for pirates continues, as evinced by statements of government officials. They say that the government loses five percent of its tax collection to pirates who do not pay tariffs and taxes. Plus, they suddenly found another rhetoric to the piracy problem: our [government officials] role is to defend our space where ideas, solutions, new business and opportunity can grow and flourish to everyone’s greater benefit. Yet this space is constantly encroached upon by those who would take and not give....


Obviously, they are oversimplifying the issue. The government wants to talk about defending a mythical space, but in the first place, are they helping to create these spaces? Are they nurturing local businesses and creative thinkers? Defending it implies that it already exists; maybe it does, but only a few have access to it. The government wants to talk about space for flourishing business opportunities, but the taxes will suck the businesses dry even before they start making money. And where do our taxes go? Ask Noriel Jarito, an independent filmmaker, who made a film with that title.

Another point: when a certain government official said that the "space is constantly encroached upon by those who would take and not give...," I honestly think that this statement is applicable to both the pirates and more so to the corrupt government officials. Since we are in the mood of oversimplifying things, we can say that the government pursues these pirates because the billions of pesos lost by the government due to these illegal activities is really a lost by government officials--okay, maybe not all of it.

Last point: the issue of piracy is an issue of copyright or intellectual property rights that favor mostly Western companies and products, or those local companies whose structure and operations follow the Western way of doing business. If you read on GATTS, WTO and TRIPs, you will realize that the concepts of copyright and IPR are working against our local scientists and artists because it is still an arena where the Western power dominates and dictates the rules of the game. And if you want to question this order of things, to show distrust to the government and question their inefficiencies and distorted logic, you may want to start with the stalls in Quiapo.