Verdadero o falso

Piracy has been defined in many ways (see Gallegos, 2000; Gopal and Sanders, 1998;

Limayem et al., 2004; WIPO, 2002) but practically all the definitions converge in the notion that it is the unauthorized copying or reproduction of material belonging to another. Essentially, piracy refers to the duplication of goods that involves the infringement of copyright. Even though piracy has been treated by some scholars within ethical frames (for example, Moores and Chang, 2006; Gupta et al., 2004;

Simpson et al., 1994; Wagner and Sanders, 2001), the fact that it constitutes a breach of copyright laws means that, essentially, piracy is illegal. Laws governing the infringement of copyright vary from one country to another (BSA, 2012) but Karaganis (2011) argues that these laws are too frequently applied from the perspective of the rights of software copyright owners and leave little space to engage with the causes of and the factors that lead people to create and use pirated goods.

According to him, the pertinent factors that should be considered in policy and academic discourses around piracy are the high prices for media goods, the low incomes of people who consume them, and the availability of cheap technologies with which pirated goods are created. As he notes, the importance of these factors is underlined by their predominance in less developed economies where piracy is most widespread.

Broadly speaking, piracy in developing countries can be described as a consequence of the effort people make to keep up with the economic, cultural and technological developments of a globalized age. It stems from the fear of being excluded from local and international flows of information as a result of poverty and social inequality (Primo and Lloyd, 2011). Although globalization has contributed to the circulation of culture and knowledge across national boundaries, it has also been blamed for the gulf in wealth between developed and developing countries (Scholte, 2005; Shah, 2010) which has prevented people in the latter from accessing what is being circulated globally. Piracy in developing countries can therefore be understood as the attempt to bridge the global wealth gap by creating channels which serve as mechanisms for access to knowledge and information (Brown et al., 2011).

The global imbalance of information can therefore be said to be at the root of practices of piracy in countries like Nigeria. I would argue that this is more so for new media workers who must keep up with the advancements in their field which is particularly subject to technological transformations in a globalized world. To catch up with new trends and techniques in web design or digital animation, they often need to update their skills and their knowledge of various tools and software. The quickest and least expensive way for them to accomplish this is through software piracy. Yet, the

acquisition and use of pirated software has its own dynamics in the Nigerian context.

These dynamics introduce experiences which represent an intensification of precariousness in the practice of new media work. This form of precariousness is marked by feelings of insecurity, uncertainty and risk while carrying out that work.

The precariousness of software piracy for new media workers in my research was based on the fact that my respondents felt insecure when using pirated software. This was because pirated software had disruptive consequences on their work. To explain this, I highlight two kinds of dynamics in relation to software piracy in the Nigerian context. The first draws on the fact that software piracy is illegal. According to Gill and Pratt (2008), precariousness in relation to work has referred to all forms of insecure, contingent, flexible labour including those that are ‗illegalized‘ (p.3). Illegal work is characterized by insecurity, uncertainty, and risk because it contravenes public laws and is therefore susceptible to disruption and discontinuation by enforcers of such laws. Since software piracy is bound by laws against the violation of copyright and intellectual property (BSA, 2010; Karaganis, 2011), those who practice it are potentially under the threat of detainment by law enforcement agents. For this reason, software pirates typically operate in covert ways in order to avoid detection. Their activity can therefore be described as insecure and precarious because, by law, it is subject to abrogation (Karaganis, 2011).

The scope of software piracy‘s illegality suggests that the production and willful consumption of pirated software are both illegal. This means that people who willfully acquire pirated software for production (as opposed to producing pirated software) are also guilty of piracy and copyright infringement. This is referred to as ‗end-user piracy‘ (Gallegos, 2000; IIPA, 2009). For this reason, my research participants who purchased or acquired pirated software for their work of producing new media were constantly at conflict with piracy laws. They too were subject to the precarious circumstances associated with working under illegal conditions. This is because, under anti-piracy schemes (see Adobe, 2009), there appears to be a blurred boundary between those who produce pirated software for willful trademark counterfeiting or for resale on a commercial scale and those who obtain and use pirated software for other

kinds of production such as new media work. Here, two categories of people can be identified: first, people who produce pirated software for profit and, second, people who use pirated software for profit. As indicated above, both categories of people are liable for breach of copyright under anti-piracy laws. Most of my research participants regularly used pirated software in their work and therefore fell into the latter category.

For this reason, many of them operated under precarious and insecure conditions characterized by the fears and concerns about being found out by enforcement agents and anti-piracy schemes of software companies.

The precariousness of software piracy in my research was also characterized by the dynamics of informality. Liang and Sundaram (2011) acknowledge that it is impossible to understand practices of piracy without understanding the conditions of informality in which they take place. This refers to ‗the social worlds in which piracy emerges, the forms of circulation and consumption in which it is implicated, and the fears and forms of social control that it generates‘ (Liang and Sundaram, 2011, p.346).

In Nigeria, the informal economy of software piracy is composed of producers and users coexisting in a symbiotic relationship. Those who produce pirated software for sale depend on the custom of others who rely on pirated software for use/production.

As I explain in the following sections, transactions between both groups take place on a regular basis, but it is replete with distrust, risk and insecurity mostly experienced by those who purchase the software. This insecurity is caused by the realization that pirated software bought from producers do not always function as expected. In many cases, this occurs because the pirated software are sold as either incomplete products (stripped of important functionalities) or trial software camouflaged as fully licensed copies. The informality of software piracy thus consigns new media workers to conditions of uncertainty and insecurity regarding the software they use for their work and therefore undermines their ability to carry out such work.

Apart from physical outlets where pirated software are sold, concerns about trust and security are also present when illegal software are obtained freely from unauthorized

internet websites. This is because malware and computer viruses²¹ have been known to accompany software which are downloaded from these illegal websites (BSA, 2009;

Gallegos, 2000). As I discuss below, new media workers in my research who obtained software from such websites were often concerned about the severe damage that could be inflicted on their computers and its potential effect on their work.

In summary, these two dynamics of software piracy point to two manifestations of precariousness: the first concerns to the illegal status of software piracy while the second pertains to the informal economy of software piracy in Nigeria. In the first, new media workers are concerned with questions about the lawful implications of piracy and its potential disruptions to their work; in the second, they are concerned with doubts about whether the software will work as expected and the consequences of such a situation on their work. Henceforth, I refer to the former as the ‗legal tensions‘

of software piracy and the latter as its ‗occupational tensions‘. In drawing attention to these ‗tensions‘, my aim is not to claim that they are unique to the Nigerian context.

As Karaganis (2011) has shown in a comprehensive study on media piracy in developing countries like Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa and Bolivia, these issues are visible in other contexts as well. Rather, my intention is to underline the relevance of software piracy as a manifestation of precariousness in Nigeria as well as how it is experienced by new media workers there.

As is the argument in this chapter (which contributes to that of the whole thesis), such a perspective of precariousness among new media workers in Nigeria varies from findings on new media work in the West which dominates the literature. In the following sections, I draw on my empirical data to discuss how these tensions were visible among those I researched. I begin in the next section by examining the reason behind the prevalence of software piracy among my research participants. As I show, the high cost of software was the most important cause of widespread software piracy among my respondents.

21 A virus is a piece of code that is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying valuable data.