Piracy and Its Regulation: The Filipino’s Historical Response to Globalization by Rolando B. Tolentino, University of the Philippines Film Institute (Paper presented at the workshop on media piracy and intellectual property in Southeast Asia, UP CMC Auditorium, 24 November 2006. Draft, not for citation. For comments, email
[email protected] .) Piracy is popularly defined as a “robbery committed at sea, or sometimes on the shore, by an agent without a commission from a sovereign nation.” 1 Pirate attacks have tripled between 1993 and 2003, with half the incidence happening in Indonesian waters in 2004, and of which, the majority occurred in the Strait of Malacca. 2 There is much to be feared in sea piracy as some 50,000 commercial ships ply the water routes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, off the Somali coast, and in the Strait of Malacca and Singapore. 3 These cargo ships holding tons of steel containers, after all, are the backbone of capitalist trade, allowing the transfer of bulk materials, produce, and waste. Media piracy, therefore, would fall into a related definition because it is an act of omission committed against a sovereign body, usually a business corporation holding the intellectual property right to the contested object, and thus protected by the corporation’s nation-state. However, media piracy does not only happen through sea lines (but in the Philippine case, it does 4), it also gets literally and figuratively reproduced technologically. A duplicating machine can reproduce 20,000 copies of music, film, games, and software per day. So invested are business corporations and their nation- states that there is almost a paranoia in protecting their objects of profit from any further loss—in seaborne piracy, estimated losses are US$13-16 billion per year 5; in media piracy, US companies lose supposedly as much as $250 billion per year, although another estimate places it at $60 billion.