Radicales 73Entonces, por definición

Crawford (2009) describes the practice of piracy in Nigeria as the result of people‘s attempt ‗to gain autonomy through microcosmic controls of the economy against a trajectory of outside influence dating back to colonialism‘ (p.6). In his view, these

‗outside‘ forces included the dominating control of the British colonialists and the external influence of the IMF and the World Bank through structural adjustment programs introduced in the country in the 1980s. Although they were aimed at reducing the role of the state, deregulating the market, allowing for the freer flow of capital globally, and generating economic well-being, the policies had adverse effects on the economy and ‗swelled the ranks of the informal sector beyond its absorptive capacity‘ (Nwaka, 2005, p.4). The outcome of this situation was the development of

‗micro-political forms of knowledge that were based in local resourcefulness‘ to deal with the privations of what Crawford (2009) referred to as the ‗Nigerian repair economy‘ (p.9). For Crawford, ‗the practice of technological reproduction‗ was at the heart of this economy (p.10) and piracy, the illegal reproduction of digital media, was its by-product.

According to Coleman (2010), digital piracy ‗interferes with the smooth functioning of capitalist and liberal-legal imperatives‘ (p.495). In Nigeria, it was also the reaction or response to the inhibitions that arise in the face of capitalist influences particularly in developing contexts. An example of this occurred when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) enforced a trade bloc against Nigeria in response to a seizure of MPAA assets by the Nigerian government in its attempt to nationalize the local film industry (Crawford, 2009). As a result, piracy began to thrive and, along with it, industries like Nollywood emerged (Larkin, 2008). As various scholars have noted, Nollywood arose out of the infrastructure created by media piracy (Larkin, 2008; Liang, 2009). In his study on the impact of media piracy on Nigeria‘s film industry, Larkin (2008) argued:

Piracy has made available to Nigerians a vast array of world media at a speed they could never imagine, hooking them up to the accelerated circuit of global media flows. Where cinema screens were once filled with outdated films from the United States or India, pirate media means that Nigerian audiences can

watch films contemporaneously with audiences in New York or Bombay.

Instead of being marginalized by official distribution networks, Nigerian consumers can now participate in the immediacy of an international consumer culture—but only through the mediating capacity of piracy. (p.224)

The growing culture of piracy in Nigeria also contributed significantly to the phenomenal rise of the video film industry (Larkin, 2008; Lobato, 2010; Ugor, 2009).

Larkin notes that the film industry was built by employing the same informal organizational and distribution networks as those used for pirating media. Therefore, while forces of capitalism and globalization contributed to the economic impoverishment of many Nigerians and restricted their access to global culture and information, piracy served as a means to open up new channels of access and, in the process, create new avenues for the distribution of local content. However, Nigeria‘s film industry is not the only sector to have benefitted from piracy. The new media industry can also be said to have developed as a result of this widespread culture of copyright infringement. Piracy has arguably empowered new media workers in Nigeria by providing them with access to the software needed for their labour.

The ‗corruption of infrastructure‘ in Nigeria as a catalyst of media piracy has been analyzed in depth by Brian Larkin (2004, 2005, 2008). According to him, much work on the transformative effects of technologies assume the smooth functioning of the systems on which they are built without ‗acknowledging the reality of infrastructural connections that are frequently messy‘ (Larkin, 2008, p.220). Larkin argues that a recognition that infrastructural breakdown forms part of the everyday life helps to shed light on phenomena like media piracy which emerge under those circumstances.

According to him,

If infrastructures represent attempts to order, regulate, and rationalize society, then breakdowns in their operation, or the rise of provisional and informal infrastructures, highlight the failure of that ordering and the recoding that takes its place. (Larkin, 2004, p.289)

Among the various ways by which infrastructure can undergo ‗recoding‘ is through the pirating of media forms such as film and software. To explain how this occurs, it will be useful to draw attention the informal practices of everyday life in Nigeria. As mentioned above, people in Nigeria resort to alternative uses for malfunctioning systems or fall back on substitutes to the failing infrastructures: the use of candles, lamps or battery-powered torches to mitigate the discomforts that arise from the regular absence of electricity; or the local storage of water – gathered from the heavy rainfall – in large basins, are regular practices in urban areas. These everyday practices have evolved not just from the collapse of infrastructure but also from the collapse of the idea that state-sponsored infrastructure are designed for the universal public good.

For this reason, these practices have grown up in the informal and private domain, away from the regulation of the state, and with a greater assurance that people‘s own systems (albeit improvised) will serve their purposes. Nevertheless, these practices are typically carried out at an personal cost to those who resort to them. As Larkin notes:

Access to private roads, satellite television, the Internet, and electricity is regulated not by the state but by how much individual consumers (as opposed to citizens) can pay for generators, bribes for preferential service, black market gasoline, and a range of goods that were once expected to be freely (or cheaply) available in the public domain. (p.246)

One important feature of infrastructures provided by the state is that they normally serve as the framework on top of which other technologies are constructed in the urban space. Electricity, for example, is the underlying layer that supports the various systems which are connected to form urban life: lighting, heating, cooling and so on.

These separate systems are often provided, not by the government, but by private entities. However, when the basic infrastructure fails, all the systems which depend on it also collapse. When this occurs frequently, as is the case in Nigeria, the common mode of operation is to depend on alternatives which, with increasing regularity, tend to fall outside the boundaries of what is legal. This explains the dubious practices of obtaining ‗bribes for preferential services‘ or gasoline from the ‗black market‘ referred to in the quote above. From this perspective, activities classified as software piracy can

be understood as little more than an alternative means for obtaining licensed software.

Software piracy is not the direct consequence of infrastructural breakdown. Rather, in Nigeria, it is can be said to be the outcome of a culture of ‗recoding‘ and of seeking alternatives to the impediments of everyday life which, in this case, refers to the prohibitive cost of original software. Just as Nigerians turn on their generators when electricity fails or they purchase petrol from the black market during periods of fuel shortages, pirated software are copied from one disk to another or bought and sold at open markets because they are too expensive to afford in their original, legal form.

Although software are not essential commodites for everyone as are electricity and fuel, they are crucial for new media workers and, what is more, the spread of software piracy is arguably more extensive than the illegal activities around those other goods.

There are at least two reasons why software piracy has spread unabated in Nigeria:

first, the digital nature of software means that they can very easily be reproduced even at no cost; second, the laws guiding copyright and issues related to intellectual property such as piracy have historically been weakly enforced in developing countries like Nigeria (see Mizukami et al., 2011; Sezneva and Karaganis, 2011). Indeed, it is arguably the case that when computers became widely used in Nigeria in the early nineties, these laws were absent and therefore most computer users were unaware that, from a global standpoint, copying and distributing unlicensed software were illegal practices. A combination of these two factors – the digital nature of software and the traditionally weak laws against copyright in Nigeria – contributed to the proliferation of pirated software and the pirating of software. Reports by the Business Software Alliance show that in 2010, the rate of software piracy in Nigeria stood at 81% and in 2011, 82% of software used in the country were pirated. To put this in better context, a 32-country survey in 2010 placed Nigeria second behind China in terms of software piracy (BSA, 2010). Arguably, software piracy has also contributed to the spread of ICT knowledge in the country and to the growth of the new media industry which depends on the use of computer software.

Although pirated software can be found in many parts of Nigeria, they are found most commonly at the ‗Otigba Computer Village‘ (OCV) – which I introduced earlier as an

example of informal economy activities. The OCV cluster is located in a densely populated area of Lagos and is arguably the most popular source of affordable, accessible and illegal software. The cluster began as a small gathering of retailers who dealt in computer parts but, over time, ‗grew to become a beehive of computer hardware, and software trade and production‘ (Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, 2006, p.15). This

‗software trade‘ eventually transformed into the commercial exchange of pirated goods conducted mainly through informal transactions with non-registered and freelance retailers. According to Zeng (2009), there are over 40,000 employees in 5,000 enterprises that operate the cluster and, although not all of them businesses participate in the production or sale of pirated software, the sale of pirated products has been a regular feature of the marketplace.

As I discuss later, the enforcement of laws against software piracy has increased as a result of lobbying from software organizations like Microsoft and Adobe. Zeng (2009) notes that the OCV cluster became so popular that the Nigerian government began to apply regulations to the businesses in relation to intellectual property and consumer protection. Also, further efforts by the Nigerian government and other organizations to curb the practice of piracy moved beyond the retailers at the OCV cluster to individual users. In spite of this however, software piracy in the country is still prevalent: my own research suggests that pirated software is still common amongst new media workers in Lagos. In Chapter 5 which deals with the precarious consequences of software piracy, I draw on my research data to discuss specific experiences of new media workers in their practice of piracy. In the next section, I move on to the topic of ethnicity which is the final theme in my discussion about the Nigerian context.