No Es EconPol, Pero Muy en La Onda - Shadow Economies of Cinema - Libro 2012, Ramón Lobato, Australia - MUY B PDF

Shadow Economies of Cinema cover 13mm spine_13mm spine 09/01/2012 12:10 Page 1
How do people
access movies today?
What are the most
popular and powerful Shadow
Shadow Economies of Cinema

channels for media
distribution on Economies
a global scale?
How are film industries
book shows how they constitute a central
rather than marginal part of audiovisual culture of Cinema
and commerce.
changing in the face
Combining film industry analysis with cultural
of media convergence theory, Shadow Economies of Cinema opens up
and digitisation? a new area of inquiry for cinema studies,
putting industry research into dialogue with
wider debates about economic informality
To answer questions such as these, argues and commodity circulation. Written in an
Ramon Lobato, we must shift our gaze away accessible style, this book offers an original
from the legal film business and toward ‘bottom-up’ perspective on the global cinema
cinema’s shadow economies. All around the industry for researchers and students in film
world, films are bought from roadside stalls, studies, cultural studies, and media and
local markets, and grocery stores; they are communications.
illegally downloaded and streamed; they are
watched in makeshift video clubs, on street RAMON LOBATO is a research fellow at
corners, and in restaurants, shops and bars. the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Mapping Informal
Ramon Lobato
International film culture in its actually- Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne,
existing forms is a messy affair, and it relies
to a great extent on black and grey media
Australia.
Film Distribution
markets. Examining the industrial dynamics C U LT U R A L H I S TO R I E S O F C I N E M A
of these subterranean film networks across Series Editors: Lee Grieveson, University
a number of different sites – from Los Angeles College London, and Haidee Wasson, Concordia
to Lagos, Melbourne to Mexico City – this University.
Ramon Lobato
Printed in China
A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

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Lobato Prelims 6/1/12 2:20 pm Page i
CULTURAL HISTORIES OF CINEMA

This new book series examines the relationship between cinema and culture. It will feature
interdisciplinary scholarship that focuses on the national and transnational trajectories of
cinema as a network of institutions, representations, practices and technologies. Of primary
concern is analysing cinema’s expansive role in the complex social, economic and political
dynamics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
SERIES EDITORS
Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson
ALSO PUBLISHED
Empire and Film, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe
Film and the End of Empire, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe
Lobato Prelims 6/1/12 2:20 pm Page ii
Lobato Prelims 6/1/12 2:20 pm Page iii
Shadow Economies
of Cinema
Mapping Informal Film Distribution
Ramon Lobato

Lobato Prelims 6/1/12 2:20 pm Page iv
© Ramon Lobato 2012
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First published in 2012 by

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Lobato Prelims 6/1/12 2:20 pm Page v
Contents
Preface . . . vii
Acknowledgments . . . viii
Introduction . . . 1
Why distribution? . . . 2
Formal and informal film economies . . . 3
Shadows, sites and circuits . . . 4
1 Distribution from Above and Below . . . 9
Redefining distribution: theory and practice . . . 10
Distribution from below . . . 13
The cultural politics of distribution . . . 14
Conclusion . . . 19
2 The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse . . . 21
‘Anything with sprocket holes’ . . . 22
The STV aesthetic . . . 24
Transnational STV circuits . . . 26
Shooting and selling STV action in the Asia-Pacific . . . 30
The slaughterhouse of cinema . . . 32
Conclusion . . . 36
3 Informal Media Economies . . . 39
The formal and the informal . . . 39
The centrality of informality . . . 41
Informal economies of cinema . . . 43
Informality, cinema and the state . . . 47
Between formal and informal distribution: Tropa de elite . . . 49
4 Nollywood at Large . . . 55
A short history of the Nigerian video boom . . . 56
The formalising imperative . . . 59
Formalising international distribution . . . 63
Conclusion . . . 66
Lobato Prelims 6/1/12 2:20 pm Page vi
5 Six Faces of Piracy . . . 69

Copyright and the construction of piracy . . . 70
Piracy as theft . . . 72
Piracy as free enterprise . . . 74
Piracy as free speech . . . 76
Piracy as authorship . . . 78
Piracy as resistance . . . 80
Piracy as access . . . 82
Everyday ethics of piracy in Tepito, Mexico City . . . 85
Tepito postscript 2010 . . . 91
6 The Grey Internet . . . 95
Mapping the online distribution ecology . . . 96
Linking sites . . . 100
Video-hosting sites . . . 101
Cyberlockers . . . 104
Informal enforcement on the digital frontier . . . 106
Conclusion . . . 109
Conclusion: Coordinates for Studying Distribution in a
Digital Age . . . 111
From pipelines to swarms . . . 112
Rethinking informational freedom . . . 114
Appendix: A Film Distribution Research Guide . . . 119
Notes . . . 129
Bibliography . . . 149
Index . . . 163
Lobato Prelims 6/1/12 2:20 pm Page vii
Preface
Each year in the coldest weeks of winter, an international film festival takes place in
my home town of Melbourne, Australia. Though it lacks the glamour of its European
counterparts, the festival’s opening-night party attracts a decent array of directors,
stars and sales agents, along with tourists from interstate and overseas. The following
three weeks afford the city’s cinephiles the opportunity to see on the big screen the
films that have been doing the rounds of the festival circuit. Each year we go through
the programme with highlighter pens at the ready, then queue in the crisp winter air
outside the festival venues dotted along Flinders Street, Swanston Street and Russell
Street. This is the official face of international film culture in the city.
Just around the corner from the festival precinct is a different kind of
international film culture, one which is the subject of this book. In DVD stores of
dubious legality, tucked away inside non-descript shopping centres, you can find copies
of many of the films screening at the festival, along with TV dramas, concert DVDs and
music videos, all of which sell for half the price of a movie ticket, or less. Many of the
discs are pirate copies or parallel-imported versions which violate official distribution
agreements. They come in plastic sleeves adorned with spelling mistakes and printing
errors. The subtitling is erratic, and sometimes the marketing blurb on the back cover
belongs to a different movie from the one advertised on the front cover. But what
these DVDs lack in finish they make up for in speed. Films usually go on sale here
months before they make their big-screen ‘premiere’.
Today, film distribution is everywhere, in every city – and not just within the
infrastructure of multiplexes, arthouses, retail chains and broadcasters that makes up
the formal film economy. Parallel to this official circuit is another world of grey-market
and counterfeit media, of cheap straight-to-video films that never register in DVD sales
data, a digital ecology of file-sharing and online video. Networks such as these are not
common objects of analysis for cinema studies but they play a vital role in the global
circulation of the moving image. What happens when we remove informal networks
from the margins and place them at the centre of our models of film reception and
consumption? This is what Shadow Economies of Cinema seeks to find out.
Preface vii
Lobato Prelims 6/1/12 2:20 pm Page viii
Acknowledgments
A great many people have helped make this book possible, too many to acknowledge
individually here. Special thanks are due to: Lee Grieveson, Haidee Wasson and
Rebecca Barden, for their support of this book; my PhD supervisors Audrey Yue and
Sean Cubitt, always unfailingly generous with their time and knowledge; Meaghan
Morris; two anonymous readers, whose feedback has greatly improved the book; my
colleagues at Swinburne University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative
Industries and Innovation, especially Julian Thomas and Stuart Cunningham, for
encouragement and advice; and to many friends and colleagues – especially Kyle Weise,
James Meese, Christian McCrea, Pete Chambers, Meg Mundell, Sun Jung, Scott Brook,
Annamma Varghese, Radha O’Meara, Darshana Jayemanne, Karina Aveyard and
Rowan Wilken – who read early drafts of this work.
The financial support of the MacGeorge Bequest, the University of California
Humanities Research Institute, the ARC Cultural Research Network and the University
of Melbourne’s Arts Faculty is gratefully acknowledged. Thank you to the editors and
publishers of Studies in Australasian Cinema, International Journal of Cultural Studies,
Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies and the edited collection The Business
of Entertainment, Vol 1: The Movies, where early drafts of some sections first appeared.
The Mexico City case study in Chapter 5 could not have happened without Tobias
Ostrander, who has played an important role in the research underpinning this book.
Joy Sandra Lee and Jonathon Auxier of the Warner Bros. Archive at University of
Southern California were wonderfully helpful during my visits in August 2008. I owe a
huge debt to Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, whose eagle-eyed editing, incisive feedback
and encyclopaedic knowledge of film history have improved this book in many ways.
Thanks especially to Leah Tang for being a constant sounding-board for half-baked
ideas and an invaluable source of critique, and to Livia Radwanski for the stunning
images of Tepito market. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the many distributors,
formal and informal, who made the time to speak to me.
This book is dedicated to my family: Jenny, Angelo and Julian Lobato.
viii Shadow Economies of Cinema

Lobato Intro 3/1/12 10:40 am Page 1
Introduction
This is a book about the circulatory dynamics of cinema – how movies travel through
space and time, and what happens to them (and us) along the way. My aim in writing
Shadow Economies of Cinema has been to offer a different way of thinking about the
innumerable practices of film viewing that are integral to everyday life around the
world but marginal to film studies as a discipline. The book therefore revolves around
a series of questions about distribution. Where is contemporary cinema located, and
how is it accessed? How do distribution networks shape the way we experience and
understand movies? What are the most popular and powerful distribution channels
for cinema on a global scale?
Shadow Economies of Cinema argues that effective answers to such questions require
us to focus our attention on informal systems of film circulation, including pirate
networks. In this sense, the book parts ways with the rich tradition of research on film
distribution and exhibition that takes cinemagoing as its departure point. While the
nickelodeons, movie houses and picture palaces of yesteryear, and the multiplexes of
today, are important sites of cultural consumption, formal theatrical exhibition is no
longer the epicentre of cinema culture. In an age when moving image culture is
increasingly disembedded from the major studios’ product pipelines, an opportunity
arises to recalibrate our research paradigms to better fit the realities of how film is
being accessed in a globalised and convergent world.
In the following chapters, I argue that this conceptual shift is best achieved by
placing what I call the shadow economies of cinema – unmeasured, unregulated and
extra-legal audiovisual commerce – at the centre of our analytical lens, and by
considering the many ways in which they interface with conventional film
industries. All around the world, films are bought from roadside stalls, local
markets and grocery stores; they are illegally downloaded and streamed; they are
watched in makeshift videoclubs, on street corners and in restaurants, shops and
bars. International film culture in its actually existing forms is a messy affair, and it
relies to a great extent on black markets and subterranean networks. Examining the
industrial dynamics of these shadow film economies across a number of different
sites – from Los Angeles to Lagos, Melbourne to Mexico City – the book shows how
they constitute a central, rather than marginal, part of audiovisual culture and
commerce.
Introduction 1
WHY DISTRIBUTION?
A belief in the inherent power of cinematic representation has long shaped the discipline
of film studies and the kinds of research carried out under its auspices. From the
perspective of a film scholar, a movie is more than a reel of celluloid or a disc encoded
with data; it is a cultural artefact endowed with transformative potential. Successive
generations of film theorists have demonstrated cinema’s capacity to catalyse ethical
awakening, to present new ways of thinking, feeling and acting, and to change in small
but significant ways our understanding of the world around us. Underlying all this is the
knowledge that cinema matters because it has social consequences.
But to be of social consequence, a film must first reach an audience. In other
words, it must be distributed. Distribution plays a crucial role in film culture – it
determines what films we see, and when and how we see them; and it also determines
what films we do not see.1 Thousands of features are produced each year, but only a
small number of these will play to large audiences. Distributors, formal and informal,
determine which films win and lose in this game of cultural consumption. In the
process, they shape public culture by circulating or withholding texts which have the
potential to become part of shared imaginaries, discourses and dreams.
While not a dominant theme in the film studies literature, distribution networks
have been studied from various perspectives. Film historians have tracked the
international expansion of the Hollywood empire and the rise and fall of national
theatre chains.2 Television scholars have analysed the commercial logics of
broadcasters and cable networks.3 Political economists have theorised distribution as
‘the key locus of power and profit’ in corporate media.4 Yet the focus in most of this work
is on formal institutions – studios, broadcasters, pay-TV providers, state regulators –
and their role in structuring media flows. There is a tendency in the existing
scholarship to approach distribution as the progression of texts through the channels
laid out for them by media industries.
I define distribution more broadly: as the movement of media through time and
space.5 Using this enlarged definition opens up the study of media industries to an
array of informal channels that are rarely documented and which may or may not be
categorised as distribution networks from the vantage point of industry research and
policy. It also moves our understanding of distribution closer to the parallel idea of
circulation that features in media and cultural studies research.6 However, I retain the
term distribution to foreground the agency of informal operators, thus placing them on
the same level analytically as their formal counterparts. As we will see, informal
distributors have played a vital role in film culture, from the early years of the medium
right up to the present. Film studies’ models of distribution must therefore encompass
not just the major studios and established independents but also a wide variety of
individuals, organisations and virtual publics operating at the edges of – or entirely
outside – the legal movie industry.
Throughout the course of this book, the reader will be introduced to some of these
informal agents. We will meet vendors hawking bootleg DVDs in crowded bazaars,
fly-by-night companies selling into low-end DVD markets, community-based
distribution networks that bypass cinemas and big-box retailers, small diasporic video
companies catering to audiences longing for home, internet users illegally exchanging
2 Shadow Economies of Cinema

Pirate DVD vending in Mexico City (Livia Radwanski)
movies through peer-to-peer networks, and many more. Informal operators like these
also count as distributors, and we should take them every bit as seriously as we do the
Hollywood studios.
FORMAL AND INFORMAL FILM ECONOMIES
In framing what we typically call the international film industry as one kind of
distribution system among many others, Shadow Economies of Cinema attempts to
develop a different kind of vocabulary for film industry analysis; one which can
account for wider a range of systems in various parts of the globe. This book therefore
takes a transnational view of film culture, approaching global industries not as
surfaces for US domination but as a complex of networks with their own logics,
strategies and ambitions. In the following chapters we will move back and forth
between sites in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe, following the movement of
films through circuits and analysing the industrial architectures which facilitate this
movement. We will observe both differences and similarities in how cinema circulates
across various sites and socio-economic contexts, in a way that does not reproduce
familiar narratives of cinematic hegemony and resistance.
Introduction 3
Consequently, this is not a book about dominant vs marginal cinemas, the

commercial vs the underground, Hollywood vs art cinema, or first cinema vs third
cinema. I make a different analytical distinction – between formal and informal
distribution – which seeks to cut across some of these categories and reorganise them
in a productive way. Formality refers to the degree to which industries are regulated,
measured, and governed by state and corporate institutions. Informal distributors are
those which operate outside this sphere, or in partial articulation with it. This book
aims to show how the informal distribution realm, far from being a marginal force at
the edges of film culture, is actually the key driver of distribution on a global scale. For
this reason, my focus is on video, disc-based and online distribution networks, where
informality is most prevalent, rather than broadcasting, cable, festival or multiplex
circuits, which are usually subject to higher levels of regulation and consolidation.7
In framing distribution in this way, I offer an analogue concept within film studies
for what social scientists call informal or ‘shadow’ economies. (The two terms are used
interchangeably here.) Shadow Economies of Cinema is structured around a simple
binary – formal vs informal distribution – which will be picked apart as the book
progresses. From this basic premise emerges the idea of shadow film economies. In the
same way that we can speak of a global system of regulated, measured, legal trade, and
below that an informal sphere in which goods and people are traded off the books, so
too can we speak of a formal film economy of studios, sales agents and festivals,
shadowed by a vast, unmeasured and unevenly governed zone of informal commerce.
These two interlocking spheres are differently exposed to regulation and
measurement, and possess their own organisational dynamics. Formal distribution is
characterised by revenue-sharing business models, complex systems of statistical
enumeration and a ‘windowing’ releasing pattern driven by theatrical premieres.
Informal distribution is mostly nontheatrical and is characterised by handshake deals,
flat-fee sales and piracy. It is a world of moving image circulation that does not show
up in the pages of Variety.
It should be emphasised that the term ‘shadow film economies’ is intended as a
heuristic device rather than a clearly defined field or category. I use it primarily as a
way to evoke the collective power of informal networks, with a view to clearing some
space for them within film studies research. But behind this gesture lies a more
substantive point. As we will see, informal film commerce is, in a very important sense,
a global norm rather than an exception or deviation. The international pirate economy
exceeds the legal film industry in size, scale and reach; so one can reasonably argue
that the ‘shadow’ economies are in fact integral to the traffic in images and sounds
that supplies the world with its daily diet of entertainment. Shadow Economies of
Cinema is both a gentle polemic for the significance of these networks to contempoary
film studies and a survey of the research domain that opens up once formality’s
epistemological authority has been set aside.
SHADOWS, SITES AND CIRCUITS
The chapters of this book take a peripatetic journey through the shadow film
economies, with each representing a successive stop on a tour of research possibilities.

The distribution networks profiled here are extremely diverse, but they have one thing
in common: each serves large, dispersed audiences without recourse to the established
institutions of film commerce. In other words, they are informal in their organisation
while also being efficient and extensive in their reach. These circuits provide glimpses
of an alternative model of media power, based on a dispersed distributive capacity
grounded in informal exchange rather than corporate muscle.
I begin by providing some theoretical context for our journey. Chapter 1,
Distribution from Above and Below, expands on the claim that distribution is a source of
meaning and a site for cultural politics as well as a delivery mechanism. I show how our
ideas about the power of media industries are produced by the modes of analysis and
measurement we bring to bear on those industries. The chapter revisits key work from
the fields of film history and political economy of communication, demonstrating how
such research – while very important to our understanding of how film industries work
– adopts a top-down perspective on the distribution business. The chapter then puts
this way of thinking about distribution into dialogue with research on informal circuits
to provide a revisionist critique of film industry historiography from the bottom up.
Chapter 2, The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse, examines a curious interstice
between formal and informal film industries. The straight-to-video/DVD production
sector makes up a very significant proportion of the larger film economy in terms of its
audience and the number of films it generates, which are often stigmatised as B-grade
schlock or even worse. But as a cinematic shadow economy it has only a ghostly
presence in our understanding of film industry structure, economics and ‘serious’ film
culture. The chapter examines the industrial dynamics of US straight-to-video
industries, focusing on the transnational itineraries of video production and
distribution networks, which connect third-world and first-world industries in unusual
ways. It concludes by considering the question of cultural value and how it plays out
within this stigmatised field.
Chapter 3, Informal Media Economies, takes a closer look at informality as an
organisational dynamic within media distribution networks. Here I draw on economic,
anthropological and urban studies research into informal economies, identifying
points of overlap with current debates in film and media studies, and considering some
of the insights that this body of work has to offer. Featuring examples of film circuits
from Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the US, the chapter identifies common
characteristics of informal distribution networks and explains how they interface with
their formal counterparts.
Chapter 4, Nollywood at Large, focuses on an informal film economy that has
become a regional powerhouse. The Nigerian video industry (Nollywood) has a unique
distribution set-up, one which takes full advantage of the efficiencies of street-level
trade. Operating almost entirely off the books, Nollywood has evolved from pre-
existing pirate networks, which provided its initial shape and structure. Today, it is
one of the greatest success stories in global cinema, producing thousands of new
movies a year and catering to the growing appetites of a pan-African audience. But
distributors are now under pressure from new copyright enforcement campaigns as
producers attempt to give a more formal structure to the industry. This chapter
considers the shifting relations between formality and informality that underwrite
Nollywood’s emergence onto the world stage.
Introduction 5
Piracy is a recurrent theme throughout the first half of the book, where the focus is
on the material aspects of film distribution circuits. Chapter 5, Six Faces of Piracy,
engages more directly with the ‘copyright wars’ rhetoric that has been such a feature of
the post-Napster era. Recent years have witnessed the rise of BitTorrent, a
corresponding ramping-up of anti-piracy enforcement and the emergence of
increasingly vocal anti-copyright/pro-piracy movements. Each side is now entrenched
in their positions, with the debate locked into an unproductive producer-vs-consumer
paradigm. This chapter seeks to expand the terms of the discussion by analysing six
‘pirate philosophies’ – piracy as theft, free speech, free enterprise, resistance,
authorship and access – thus thinking piracy in the plural rather than the singular. In
the final section of the chapter, the complexities of informal trade are illustrated with
a portrait of a DVD vendor in one of Mexico City’s most notorious pirate media
markets.
Chapter 6, The Grey Internet, focuses specifically on digital distribution, tracking
new configurations of the formal and the informal in online environments. The online
distribution ecology is extremely fragmented and fast-changing, and in many of the
most popular platforms it is hard to draw a clear line between legal and illegal content,
or formal and informal distribution. In this chapter, I demonstrate how internet piracy
is accelerated by market gaps in legal media systems. I also consider how the formal
and informal realms intersect at the level of copyright enforcement. The broad aim is
to look beyond dominant rhetorics of digital distribution – the internet as a
revolutionary force for distributive democracy or a lawless frontier of copyright
infringement – in favour of a closer examination of how the formal and informal
spheres converge online, and the ‘grey’ zones of distribution thus produced. The book
concludes by setting out some coordinates for the critical study of distribution in a
digital age, as industrial processes of distribution give way to amorphous practices of
decentralised content sharing.
Moving from 16mm stag film parties to video stores to file-hosting sites, Shadow
Economies of Cinema is deliberately eclectic in its case studies, while also being
consistent in its preoccupations. The emphasis throughout is on questions of access in
cinema culture. This marks a deliberate step away from the debates over
representation and interpretation that have long occupied the discipline of film
studies. I argue that we need to take distributive politics as seriously as we do textual
politics. A distribution-centred model of film studies asks: who is the audience? How
are they constructed as such? What are the material limits that determine which texts
are available to which audiences? I believe attention to questions such as these may
help to broaden the scope of contemporary film studies, to bring the discipline into
dialogue with other forms of social and cultural analysis, and to guarantee its relevance
as we move further into an age of media convergence.

Left Behind (2000), a breakthrough DVD-only release from Cloud Ten Pictures
Lobato Ch1 3/1/12 10:51 am Page 9
1
Distribution from Above and Below
Avid viewers of The Simpsons may recall a particularly amusing episode from 2005
called ‘Thank God, It’s Doomsday’. After seeing a Christian propaganda movie called
Left Below, Homer becomes convinced that the Rapture is coming and rallies the
citizens of Springfield to prepare for the impending apocalypse. The fated hour arrives
and he is lifted up to heaven, where he meets – and subsequently annoys – God, who
decides to turn back time and reverse the Rapture rather than endure the presence of
Homer in paradise.
Aside from some gags about numerology and Evangelism, this Simpsons episode
also contains compelling evidence of the power of informal film distribution networks.
The Left Below film that has such a profound effect on Homer is not a figment of Matt
Groening’s imagination but a tongue-in-cheek reference to an actually existing series
of B-grade films – the Left Behind (2000, 2002, 2005) trilogy – which achieved an
extraordinary level of success among US Evangelicals in the early 2000s. Its presence
in The Simpsons is testament to Left Behind’s status as one of the most unusual pop-
culture phenomena of the last decade, a film franchise which sold an astonishing 6
million DVDs via a grassroots distribution strategy that bypassed the Hollywood
system.1
Based on a series of popular books, the Left Behind movies were the brainchild of a
small Niagara Falls company called Cloud Ten Pictures. Cloud Ten decided to forgo the
usual theatrical release model and market the films in its own way. Rather than
screening Left Behind in cinemas, it released the film straight-to-DVD and focused its
attention on the film’s primary market: Evangelical communities. Thousands of
‘church cinema’ screenings were held across the USA, with ministers promoting the
film enthusiastically from the pulpit. Sometimes the film’s stars (mostly B-grade actors
like Kirk Cameron, from the 1980s sitcom Growing Pains) would show up as well.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans saw the Left Behind movies in these church
cinemas.2 Millions more purchased the DVDs to watch at home.
Operating outside the established structures of the US film industry, the producers
of Left Behind challenge our ideas about the distinction between independent and
mainstream cinema culture. Companies like Cloud Ten have their own ideas about how
to produce, distribute, market and exhibit movies. The highly organised and efficient
model of church screenings combined with DVD sales constitutes a viable alternative
to mainstream releasing patterns. Regardless of what we may think about the
ideological content of Left Behind, or the resurgence of the religious Right in the USA,
Distribution from Above and Below 9

this example vividly illustrates the power of informal networks. Approaching these
shadow circuits not as anomalies but as an integral feature of the audiovisual
landscape can help to generate a new understanding of how movies travel inside and
outside established channels.
This chapter expands on one of the fundamental arguments of the book: that our
ideas about what cinema is and where it circulates have been shaped around specific
(but far from universal) distribution models. I want to suggest that there are other
stories to be told about distribution, and that we can think about this topic in a
broader way. The present chapter develops this idea by revisiting the existing body of
research on film industry structure and exploring how and where this literature does –
and does not – account for unconventional distribution models like that of Cloud Ten.
In this way, I clear some space for a revisionist history of nontheatrical and informal
distribution circuits within the dominant narratives of film industry analysis, and
provide theoretical foundations for the case studies to come in later chapters.
REDEFINING DISTRIBUTION: THEORY AND PRACTICE
It may be helpful at this point to consider how the term ‘distribution’ is used in both
common speech and in film industry discourse. In the most general sense, distribution
involves the dispersal of matter or information across a given geographical area or
temporal period. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the ‘action of dividing
and dealing out or bestowing in portions among a number of recipients’.3 This action
has both a passive mode (the distribution of cancer genes in a population) and an
active mode (the distribution of pamphlets by political activists).
In its active mode, distribution becomes an industrial process and a cultural
technology. Soft drink distribution, for example, begins at the end of the production
line and involves all those activities which are required to facilitate purchase, many of
which would typically be subcontracted to logistics contractors. These include
importation of the finished product, payment of taxes and duties, transport to
warehouses and retailers, stocktaking and inventory, collection of payment, liaison
with vendors, price monitoring and so on. This part of the product lifecycle also
involves a variety of informational activities such as marketing, advertising and public
relations, which occupy an increasingly important role within the distribution process.
Distribution acquires new shades of meaning in different contexts. For example,
ideas of distribution and redistribution play important roles in political philosophy,
and economic redistribution is a central practice within public policy. Taxation,
industry subsidies, welfare payments – these are all concerned with the distribution
and redistribution of resources and money.4 But while the idea of distribution is a key
plank of social democratic government, it is far from uncontested. In the USA,
‘redistributionist’ is an insult hurled by conservatives at liberals.5 This reminds us that
questions of distribution are nothing if not political. If we understand politics as a
struggle for power and resources, then distribution is politics at its purest.
In film industry discourse, distribution has a more concrete set of meanings.
Conventional typologies, such as those offered in media studies textbooks, describe
distribution as the segment of the film industry linking production and

exhibition/consumption, involving the sale, reproduction, delivery, translation,

marketing and promotion of motion pictures in various territories and across all
formats, from 35mm prints to digital downloads. Compared to production, the
distribution sector receives little public attention. Yet it constitutes the biggest part of
the overall industry in terms of personnel and revenues, as the following quote from
former 20th Century-Fox executive Strauss Zelnick makes clear:
The bulk of our business is distribution. Probably three quarters of our employees are
involved in generating revenues. Out of the other quarter, most are involved in counting
revenues, and then we have about twelve people who are involved in actually making movies.
The bulk of our business is financing, distributing, and accounting. We have a huge staff that
does nothing but license our pictures in all markets around the world.6
The distribution sector that Zelnick describes here is in a state of ongoing reinvention.
Even within the relatively stable Hollywood studio structure, distribution practices
have evolved significantly over the years in the face of technological developments and
regulatory realignments.
The early years of cinema were characterised by a gradual formalisation of
distribution processes, and increasing complexity in the chain from production to
consumption. In the USA, the first formal distribution structures were the film
exchanges that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century.7 Exchanges
institutionalised the informal practices of swapping and trading that were common
among exhibitors. These exchanges would purchase films from producers and then
rent them out to exhibitors. Over time a system of price differentiation began to
emerge with new releases attracting a higher rate than older titles. A subscription
system also took hold, meaning that exchanges committed to buy the output of a
particular producer over a given period of time.8
The studio era was characterised by increasing levels of standardisation in
distribution. The Runs–Zones–Clearances system established for the first time a
formal hierarchy of exhibitors, reflecting a strategic ‘spatial and temporal separation of
markets’ that has been central to mainstream distribution strategy ever since.9 Films
began their run in the swanky metropolitan theatres, then after a strictly monitored
embargo period (the clearance) migrated to second- and third-run venues located on
the urban fringes before ending up in far-flung regional theatres. Control of
distribution proved to be the basis of the US studios’ dominance and the guarantee of
their future prosperity.10
This system of strategic market segmentation was extended to include formats as
well as theatre circuits in the post-television era. The ‘windowing’ model, involving the
staggered movement of content across overlapping release windows (theatrical, cable,
DVD, pay-TV, broadcast TV and so on), became the master logic of mainstream film
distribution in the latter half of the twentieth century. The role of the major studios
and distributors, evocatively described by Edward Epstein as ‘dream clearinghouses’,
has since been to oversee and manage the flows of money and data that these
movements generate.11 In the internet age, distribution has taken on yet more
meanings. As formats proliferate and converge, the objective of distribution is to
exploit film content across as many different platforms as possible. Intellectual

property exploitation and enforcement take centre stage as the emphasis shifts
towards monetisation of content in a multi-channel environment.
Film historians and political economists who have analysed the evolution of this
model often focus on power relations between studios, producers, exhibitors and the
state. As a result, there is a rich body of work on the structural organisation of film
distribution pipelines in the USA and internationally. Janet Wasko and Thomas
Guback, among others, have written widely and lucidly on this topic. Guback
emphasises the role of ‘the policies developed by the American industry to capture and
maintain markets and to obstruct foreign competition’ as instrumental to the global
dominance of Hollywood.12 This body of work reminds us that the business of
mainstream film distribution is characterised by oligopoly and collusion, and it offers a
powerful critique of the studios’ business practices. At the same time, it places certain
circulatory systems (chiefly, studio distribution) squarely at centre of the analysis and
relegates others to the sidelines of film history.
This top-down perspective on distribution is in part a product of the
methodological norms of film industry research, in which certain forms of empirical
knowledge are privileged. Chief among them is box-office revenue, the holy grail of
industry knowledge.13 Box-office data, compiled by the studios and market research
firms like Nielsen, constitute the basis upon which success and failure, dominance and
marginality, are judged. Yet box-office data is only one part of the story of a film’s
circulation through diverse markets. It does not, for example, tell us how many people
watch a given film on TV, how many buy the DVD then make copies for their friends,
how many download the film, or buy a bootleg copy at their local corner store or street
market. It is also highly vulnerable to manipulation by the studios.14
In her influential book Desperately Seeking the Audience, Ien Ang describes these
industrial knowledge-generation practices as the ‘institutional point of view’. For Ang,
who was writing about broadcasting industries in the 1980s, technologies of audience
measurement work to represent consumer activity in statistically concrete ways. The
objective is for distributors to come to know and understand their publics as
assemblages of empirical data. This necessarily involves an erasure:
In the everyday realm, living with television involves a heterogeneous range of informal
activities, uses, interpretations, pleasures, disappointments, conflicts, struggles,
compromises. But in the considerations of the institutions that possess the official power to
define, exploit and regulate the space in which television is inserted into the fabric of culture
and society, these subjective, complex and dynamic forms of audiencehood are generally
absent; they disappear in favour of a mute and abstract construct of ‘television audience’ onto
which large-scale economic and cultural aspirations and expectations, policies and planning
schemes are projected.15
Ang is pointing here to the epistemological dimensions of distribution practice. In her

account, knowledge of media practice is shaped for institutional uses and expressed in
institutional vocabularies, suppressing informal circulations and experiences. A key
task of media scholarship is to deconstruct the ‘politics of knowledge’ that governs this
relation.16 Ang’s point applies equally to cinema. Critical analysis of film industries
must be careful not to take the forms of knowledge these industries produce at face

value, lest we end up reproducing the same familiar narratives about how film
circulates and is consumed. It is important to acknowledge the many gaps in the
industry’s data sets, and to think about how these shape our understanding of
audiovisual circulation. For example, many smaller cinemas and independent retailers
do not participate in the data-collection efforts of the major studios, and the degree of
variation is especially strong in international box-office accounting. As a result, the
current distribution system is unable to measure the circulation of, or demand for,
non-Hollywood cinemas.17 Hence it is not surprising that films like Left Behind fall
through the cracks of the measurement system and are rendered invisible. This also
explains why many networks of film circulation in developing nations are not counted
within this framework.
We clearly need to complement the Hollywood-centric institutional critique of
distribution with approaches attuned to the workings of informal networks, which
play such a vital role in the movement of film worldwide and which have their own
specific dynamics and characteristics. To insist on the diversity of the distribution
landscape is not to deny the power of dominant circuits but to acknowledge that our
analyses of cinematic circulation need not start and end with the Hollywood studios,
national distribution oligopolies, or state institutions. Alternative and parallel
distribution circuits have always existed alongside studio infrastructures, including the
many nontheatrical circuits that transport cinema into homes, workplaces, vehicles,
aeroplanes, clubs, restaurants, bars and countless other sites. As Barbara Klinger
argues, an understanding of such networks is ‘key to grasping the depth and breadth of
cinema’s social circulation and cultural function’.18
DISTRIBUTION FROM BELOW
What might such a diversified analysis of film distribution involve? What other tales
can we tell about how the moving image circulates? I will stay with the US example for
a moment, to make an additional point about the vantage points of film industry
historiography. While most scholars have focused their efforts on the major studios,
there is a minor strand of historical research that provides a counter-narrative to the
‘institutional point of view’, offering a fertile ground upon which to build an analysis
of cinema’s shadow economies.
A good place to start is the literature on 16mm and other narrow-gauge cinemas.
From the 1920s onwards, 16mm circuits opened up a whole new market for
nontheatrical and non-professional distribution, providing a parallel infrastructure for
moving image dissemination, education and appreciation. As scholars including
Charles Acland, Haidee Wasson and Patricia Zimmerman have documented, in
contrast to the studios’ increasingly consolidated distribution networks, the 16mm
landscape was ‘wildly unorganized, decentralized, and difficult to monitor let alone
control’.19 Individuals and small organisations suddenly found themselves in the
position of being de facto film distributors, generating new kinds of viewing practices
and modes of consumption. Private rental companies hawked their wares through
camera stores and mail-order. Libraries, galleries, unions, community groups, ethnic
clubs and political organisations hosted their own film nights. Within this alternative

circulatory system, new hubs and nodes appeared.20 Film councils and film societies
performed mediating functions, generating an alternative circulatory infrastructure
and regulatory system. A vast network of amateur film clubs cross-pollinated with
avant-garde and foreign cinema scenes.21
And then, of course, there are the black-market circuits. We don’t often think of
pornographers as film distributors, but they have played a crucial role in the
dissemination of the moving image in many nations. Porn has long had its own
alternative networks that, while informal and subterranean, are efficient and wide-
reaching. Long before the invention of the VCR, 8mm and 16mm adult movies were
watched in clubs and home theatres. From the 1910s onwards, travelling showmen
would host stag parties in ‘smoke-filled lodge halls and fraternity houses’.22 By the
1930s there was an established mail-order distribution network for adult cinema, with
small companies like Pacific Ciné Films and Nu Art doing a lively trade in girlie movies,
hawking their wares in magazines for amateur cinema enthusiasts. After the war, 8mm
porn was sold under the counter in photo stores, bars, petrol stations and workplaces.
While the history of these circuits is sparsely documented, we should not
underestimate the scale of the industry nor its capacity for rapid and effective
distribution.
Nor should we overlook the importance of pirates within the history of film
distribution. Piracy, which is as old as cinema itself, has been a fundamental driver of
global film distribution since the turn of the twentieth century. Meliès’ classic 1902
film A Trip to the Moon was widely copied, especially in the USA, where the director was
unable to secure any profits from its exhibition. Other piratical practices – such as
‘bicycling’ and ‘jackrabbiting’, in which exhibitors put on unapproved screenings of
popular films in violation of distribution agreements – were common throughout the
early cinema period. The black market for 16mm bootleg prints and private projection
equipment which emerged in the post-war period would also prove problematic for the
established distributors, with army officers frequently emerging as the culprits in
bootlegging rings.23 Every new distributive technology has spawned its own form of
pirate exchange.
These are but a few examples of the shadow circuits that have always existed
alongside studio distribution. In the next chapter, we will take a closer and longer look
at the nontheatrical video cultures which emerged in the 1970s and which constituted
a parallel circuit for the production and distribution of movies in the home video era.
My point here is a straightforward one: even on its own home turf, the Hollywood
system has never been the only game in town. Film has circulated and been enjoyed
informally from the earliest days of the medium, and if this informal circulation has
not shown up in our data sets and research frameworks it is because they have been
calibrated in a way that renders these movements invisible.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DISTRIBUTION
A ground-level view on the movement of cinema through time and space opens up a
new set of possibilities, allowing us to think about distribution not only in terms of
structures, institutions and policies, but also in terms of everyday encounters with the

moving image. As part of this project, we need to develop critical vocabularies that are
suitable for comparative research across different sites and that do not reproduce
culturally specific ways of thinking about media and its circulation.
A memorable example of this kind of alternative distribution analysis is S. V.
Srinivas’s account of the theatrical B-circuit in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.24
B-circuit cinemas are old, run-down and located in remote villages where bigger
distributors do not venture. Srinivas describes how Hong Kong martial arts films are
acquired second-hand from Asia, make their way though the Indian cities and are
then bought and sold in lots by entrepreneurial local traders, many of whom do not
have a background in the film industry, before ending up in these theatres. Prints
are sent out to the most remote village theatres where they are screened until they
disintegrate. Distributors splice sequences from other movies into the film reels in
an attempt to give the audience more value for money, and titles of films are
changed at will (for example, Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master II [1994] becomes
Dangerous Guy). In these low-value markets, profit margins are so slim that
established distributors do not bother competing, so this particular system of
informal distribution works to fill gaps in the market and facilitate film cultures that
would not otherwise exist. It is an off-the-books industry that does not show up in
indexes of global film trade.
There is little room in the conventional models of film and media studies for
informal systems like this. The Indian B-circuit is difficult to study via modes of
analysis geared towards consolidated and regulated Euro-American industries.
Srinivas’s approach is different. He looks closely at the reception contexts for Indian
cinema, the specific publics they call into being, and the mechanics of the distribution
system itself. In this way, economic structure is analytically yoked to affective
experience, and the everyday enjoyment of cinema is understood in terms of its
position within broader processes of subject and citizen formation. This is an excellent
template for informal distribution research.
The challenge here is to think about distribution through the lens of cultural
politics as well as political economy. Understanding how this relation plays out in
different times and spaces requires a flexible set of tools, and no single meta-theory
will be appropriate in every setting. However, it is possible to establish some general
analytical coordinates to guide our enquiry. Shadow Economies of Cinema is
underwritten by a number of fundamental claims about the nature of film distribution
– and media distribution more broadly – and its relation to everyday life, which can be
summarised as follows:
1. Distribution is about the transmission of values, competencies and ideology. It is a

site of cultural politics.
2. Distribution is the ground upon which reception occurs. Without distribution, a
text has no audience.
3. Distribution inscribes cultural difference. It fragments audiences along lines of
gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity and class.
4. Distribution frames the way texts are experienced and understood by audiences.
5. Distribution shapes film culture in its own image.
6. Informal film distribution is the global norm.

These propositions, which together make up a kind of rationale for the critical analysis
of distribution networks, help focus our attention simultaneously on the material and
the symbolic, the cultural and the economic, the micro and the macro. Keeping these
general ideas in mind when studying distribution systems ensures that we do not
reproduce the ‘institutional point of view’ or take its claims for granted. As a way of
concluding this introductory chapter and providing some theoretical context for those
that follow, let me briefly expand on these points and offer some examples.
The starting point for any analysis of distribution circuits should be an affirmation
of the centrality of audiovisual media within processes of subject formation. While
burying ourselves in the detail of how distribution networks function, we should not
lose sight of why cinema is important in the first place – and by extension, why
distribution matters for cultural analysis. Movies shape the future self: they teach us
how to be women, men, children, mothers, fathers; they show us how to talk, dance,
love and think. Whether at the level of style, sentiment or overt politics, whether for
good or for ill, films are agents of change. Without distribution, however, none of this
is possible. To insist on the primacy of distribution is to invert the text-centric norms
of an older model of film analysis.
Distribution’s functions can be broken down further. At the most obvious level,
there is the question of provision and denial: distributors, formal and informal, make
cinema texts available or unavailable to audiences. Many films never get picked up for
release or remain locked in the vaults because of a presumption that they will fail
commercially. There is also the question of state involvement in distributive processes
to consider, of which there are countless examples: Nagisa Ôshima’s In the Realm of the
Senses (1976) has always been screened in Japanese cinemas in a censored version, for
example, while Andrew Lau’s Hong Kong police epic Infernal Affairs (2002) acquired an
alternative ending for the mainland Chinese market to avoid upsetting the censors.
But what we also need to consider are processes of textual regulation that take place
informally, rather than via direct government intervention. In the pirate DVD
economies discussed in Chapter 5, all manner of content is available, so long as there is
a market for it. But when a text declines in popularity, it may fall out of circulation and
become more difficult, if not impossible, to acquire. In other words, it is censored –
made unavailable – by the logic of the market, rather than the state. These market-
based control mechanisms work via cumulative actions by many minor agents rather
than broad governmental sweeps.
Distribution reflects cultural and socio-economic difference, but it also inscribes
difference in new ways. Audiences are organised and separated by distribution
networks on the basis of gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, class and other
vectors of identity and status. This aspect of distribution has been explored by the
anthropologist Jeffrey Himpele, a specialist in Bolivian media, who argues that
distribution is productive: it creates meaning and difference. Himpele tracks films as
they move through social space, using these trajectories as entry points into a broader
analysis of class and cultural capital. He begins a key essay on this topic with a
discussion of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), mapping its staggered movement
outwards from the bourgeois cinemas at the bottom of the La Paz valley on to a variety
of cheaper cines populares frequented by immigrant and indigenous underclasses. This
trajectory both mirrors and consolidates existing social divisions: ‘distribution

Cinema’s cultural geographies: a map of Los Angeles, taken from a New York Times online feature based on Netflix DVD rental data,
shows the spatial distribution of audiences for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
itineraries mark, separate, and organize the relations between people and places and
what stories are told about them’. The trickle-down model of distribution at work in La
Paz reflects distributors’ ‘social imagination of the city’ as well as broader patterns of
economic inequality.25
As gatekeepers to circulating commodities, distributors distribute local differences by

composing a series of sights and sites – like narrative cinema’s internal succession of inter-
cutting scenes – to form a media containing potent narrative schemes. Reading this temporal
and spatial field (what I have called itineraries) spectators insert themselves as subjects when
they decide, or feel it is decided for them, which films to see and where to see them.26
This approach links the political-economic aspects of film distribution that have long
interested scholars with questions of social and cultural practice. Contexts of
distribution – where, how and when people encounter movies – frame the perceived

meaning of texts and the way we incorporate them into our symbolic lives.
Distribution elevates some cinematic encounters (opening nights, festival screenings)
to the status of cultural events and relegates others (two-for-one weekly rentals, late-
night movies) to the bottom of the value chain. Plucked off a dusty shelf in an Indian
spice store, a pirate DVD of a Bollywood movie may appear to some viewers a
disposable piece of ‘ethnic’ media, but if the same film is seen in a theatre in Calcutta
or at the opening night of an international film festival in Chicago it will become
something else entirely. The key variable here is distributive context. These framings
and reframings are a vital, yet invisible, part of everyday film consumption in complex
media environments. Barbara Klinger, drawing on Raymond Williams’s notion of
signal systems, understands these processes in terms of ‘institutional cues’, which
shape audience expectations of texts in subtle but profound ways.27 This production of
contextual meaning is as central to distributive processes as the delivery functions
described in media industry textbooks.
The act of distribution also materially shapes the text itself, adding another layer
of meaning to the viewing experience. Film reels acquire marks and scratches as they
move through exhibition circuits, from the big global cities to the low-value markets.
Cinemagoers in regional areas and developing nations are all too familiar with these
reminders of their peripheral status in the distribution hierarchy. Textual subtractions
and additions are particularly noticeable in informal distribution circuits, and above all
in pirate circuits. Low-quality DVD burning often results in freezing and pixellation,
the digital equivalent of static. Timecodes and logos appear, revealing the original
source of the pirate version. Sometimes the sound is poorly synchronised or the
subtitles are missing. Handicam bootlegs recorded in theatres often feature bobbing
heads, ambient sounds (laughter, coughs, yawns) and a colour palette that seems
slightly bleached, making the film appear as if it were shot on ageing film stock and
adding a strange kind of temporal dislocation to the viewing experience. Scholars
including Lucas Hilderbrand and Laikwan Pang have begun to theorise some of these
meanings, providing a kind of media archaeology of faulty formats and the ‘laborious
and alienated’ spectatorships they generate.28
There is also a deeper level of textual re-engineering at work in distribution
processes, which not only deliver audiovisual goods to the consumers who desire them
but also work to shape those desires by dictating the terms under which these goods
may be acquired. Whether formal or informal, distributors place limits on the range of
options available to us by supplying some films rather than others, and they shape our
consumption of this sub-set of distributed audiovisual production through commercial
technologies ranging from advertising and public relations to price differentiation,
release strategy, release timing and so on. In contrast to the neoclassical economic
model of perfectly competitive equilibrium, in which production responds directly to
demand by satisfying the needs and wants of a particular market, analysis of
distribution circuits often reveals that demand can be an effect of distribution. In other
words, distributors shape public taste as well as reflect it, creating a feedback loop
between distribution and demand.
This feedback loop has subtle effects on film cultures. When distributors set out to
(re)ignite consumer demand for certain products – from never-before released
‘masterpieces’ of Iranian cinema through to back-catalogue Roger Corman movies or

Asian horror box sets – they weave new narratives about cinema’s past and future,
endowing texts with certain kinds of cultural value. Over time, this process also allows
new styles and genres to emerge as demand is massaged into new textual formations,
feeding back into future production decisions. In this way, distribution shapes film
culture in its own image. Similar processes are at work in informal circuits, which often
bring marginal texts back into circulation and create new ways of viewing and
understanding them. As the Indonesian film critic Ekky Imanjaya notes, Indonesia’s
supernatural horror and exploitation films from the 1980s – The Queen of Black Magic
(1983), Lady Terminator (1989), Virgins from Hell (1987), Mystics in Bali (1981) – have
long been considered embarrassing additions to the national cinema canon, but many
of these films are now getting a new lease of life among the Indonesian middle class
thanks to their popularity in pirate circuits.29 This is but one example of how informal
distribution can re-engineer public taste.
Stressing the largely informal nature of global distribution reminds us that movie
business happens not only in corporate boardrooms, at festival soirées or industry
conventions, but also in street markets, bazaars, illegal rental businesses, places of
worship and grocery stores. Distribution is the province of enthusiasts, small-time
traders, fly-by-night entrepreneurs, gangsters, preachers and a whole host of other
non-professional agents. Analysing distribution from below as well as above reveals a
vast array of informal circuits bubbling away beneath the surface of mainstream film
industries, in many different nations, across many different formats. As we move
through the remaining chapters of this book, we will venture further and further into
this informal realm.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has provided some coordinates for the critical analysis of distributive
networks. My argument throughout has been that informal distribution is a central
rather than marginal feature of film culture. While it is has not been prominent in film
industry scholarship, we can draw on existing work to create flexible new approaches
for the analysis of these circuits. By paying attention to otherwise invisible networks –
such as those through which the Evangelical film Left Behind travels – we glimpse the
size and scale of the informal film economy. At the same time, we must keep in mind
power relations within distribution networks and the social and cultural processes
they catalyse.
In the following chapter we will take a closer look at the history of nontheatrical
distribution via a study of early straight-to-video film. My focus will be on the late
1970s to the mid-1980s, a boom period for video distribution and straight-to-video
production. Like the early 16mm networks, VHS ushered in new forms of film
circulation and reception, creating its own genres, stars and aesthetic norms. A
significant amount of straight-to-video production and distribution took place under
conditions that could only be described as informal, involving ephemeral companies
with shady backgrounds. As we will see, straight-to-video – an interstice in the
mainstream distribution model – became a haven for low-budget film production and a
direct descendant of many of the informal circuits discussed in this chapter.

Mounir Fatmi, Skyline (2007),VHS tapes, 800 x 365cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York. Photographer:
Jean-Baptiste Dorner. Exhibition view from Fuck Architects: Chapter III, FRAC Alsace, Sélestat, France, 2009
2
The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse
In his 2007 installation Skyline, the Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi offers us a
memorable image of the city as, quite literally, a cinematic space. Fatmi uses hundreds
of VHS cassettes to construct a plastic cityscape, stacking them carefully to suggest
office blocks, monuments and skyscrapers. Each cassette has been opened up to reveal
the tape inside, which falls gently over the videos and the empty space below. As the
threads of tape hit the floor, they form a huge tangle that reaches out horizontally
towards the viewer, like the hair of some dark giant.
This work, which stands almost 4 metres high, had a powerful effect on me when I
saw it. It brought to mind debates about the mediatisation of urban experience, the
spread of surveillance technology, the expressive power of architecture. But, above all,
it made me think about home video. The viewer of Skyline has no way of knowing what
images and sounds these cassettes contained, if any. There is something almost
sacrilegious about seeing a videocassette stripped of its ability to be anything other
than a vessel for black tape. Media objects lose their aura of transformative power
when their materiality is exposed in this way. Cinema becomes waste.
When we think about cinema from the perspective of the text, films seem like
isolated aesthetic objects, unique and powerful. Approaching cinema from the
perspective of distribution offers a different vantage point, allowing us to see film as a
commodity circulating in space and time. The reality of the film economy is that there
are many more films released each year than there is critical capacity to analyse and
make sense of them. Every year, thousands of movies are released into nontheatrical
markets, and most disappear off the radar without having made any kind of mark.
Some are watched by only a handful of people. This presents a problem for theories of
cultural value, raising intriguing questions about the relationship between the
perceived value of a film and its distributive context. There is an incommensurability
of scale here: the nontheatrical market is enormous, yet obscure.
In Chapter 1 I suggested that distribution circuits shape film culture in their own
image, creating demand for new forms of cultural production. In this chapter, which
focuses on straight-to-video releasing and the peculiar production cultures it has
generated, we will see ample evidence of this feedback loop between distributors and
producers. From low-budget action movies to erotic thrillers, straight-to-video
distribution has spawned its own speciality genres, iconography and star system.
Operating outside theatrical exhibition networks, straight-to-video circuits have their
own specific dynamics and are only partially integrated with mainstream film
The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse 21

industries. In this sense, straight-to-video has strongly informal features. My focus in

this chapter is on the bottom end of the video market, where informal production and
distribution practices are common. Note that the term ‘straight-to-video’, as used
here, encompasses all pre-recorded home video formats, including DVD, and does not
refer exclusively to VHS.1
‘ANYTHING WITH SPROCKET HOLES’
Reliable data on the nontheatrical movie sector is hard to find, but according to a study
by the Harvard economists Anita Elberse and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, 59 per cent of titles
in the US video/DVD marketplace are released straight-to-video.2 There are vast
straight-to-video industries in nations such as Japan (home to ‘V-cinema’ straight-to-
DVD releases and ‘OVA’, or original video animation, movies), Thailand (where
straight-to-VCD release is popular with independent directors3) and Mexico (known for
its ‘videohome’ narcotraficante movies). And as we will see in Chapter 4, Nigeria’s
booming film economy is run entirely on a straight-to-video model that has reinvented
the possibilities of nontheatrical releasing. Despite its unsavoury reputation, straight-
to-video is a big – and global – business. In terms of the number of films released each
year, straight-to-video is the empirical norm of contemporary cinema.
The emergence of straight-to-video (hereafter STV) as a releasing model needs to
be understood in the context of the emergence of video hardware and video markets in
the 1970s, which led to major structural changes in the distribution sector. Having
dispatched the remaining format rivals, the VHS and Beta systems battled it out
throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, with the former emerging victorious around
1988. Soon video was generating more revenue than the box office, and its potential as
an untapped market had been well and truly acknowledged by the major studios. At
the same time, the rapid domestic take-up of VCRs created a serious product shortage
on the content side. Demand for movies to fill the shelves of video stores and the
schedules of cable stations (which began operation around the same time as video
appeared on the scene) was such that US production skyrocketed from around 350
pictures per year in 1983 to nearly 600 in 1988.4 As in the studio era when producers
madly cranked out product to meet the insatiable demand of audiences, or in the early
days of TV when the networks were desperate for movies to screen, this was a seller’s
market. The following quote from a former senior vice-president of New Line Cinema
attests to this:
Perhaps the biggest boon that has ever occurred in the independent sector was the explosion
of home video in the early eighties. It was a voracious market for anything with sprocket
holes, and even the major studios couldn’t provide enough product to satisfy the demand. All
of a sudden there was enormous capital available to independent theatrical distributors as
advances against the home-video rights. Not only was all this money being used to acquire
films, it also fueled the entrance of many independents into production.5
North American consumers were not the only ones clamouring for anything with
sprocket holes, for the video boom also coincided with the ongoing deregulation of

Table 2.1 Structure of the US video economy, 1980s–90s

Majors Mini-majors Video independents
Fox Miramax Island International Video
Sony/Columbia Orion Avco Embassy Entertainment
Disney Cannon Filmways/AIP Vidmark
Paramount De Laurentiis Group Virgin Vision Magnum Entertainment
Universal New Line Lorimar Lightning Video
MGM Nelson ThrillerVideo
Prism Entertainment Monterey Home Video
Hemdale FilmDallas
New World Atlantic Releasing
Carolco Avenue
Vestron MCEG
Media Home Weintraub
Entertainment Entertainment Group
Family Home and others
Entertainment
broadcasting in Europe, Asia and Latin America. As formerly state-run stations were
commercialised and/or privatised, the demand for ‘average or below-average American
films’ increased exponentially and a new market niche was born. In 1984 home video
was generating $1.4 billion for US film suppliers, with more than half of this going to
independent companies.6
By the time STV releasing hit its peak in the mid- to late 1980s, an array of small
US operators was actively competing for a slice of the action (see Table 2.1). These
independents worked on a flexible model of dispersed, small-scale production and ad
hoc distribution through the mini-majors, the larger independents, small fly-by-night
operators, or through self-distribution.7 This sector of the film industry was chaotic
and undercapitalised, but there was money to be made for those who knew how to tap
the right market.
While many of these new video entrepreneurs were entering the film industry for
the first time, others were established players. Of these, quite a few came over from
the B-film and exploitation industries. Others had connections to the adult industries.
Noel Bloom, for example, had a background in adult distribution and later went on to
head the ironically named Family Home Entertainment, a key company in the
independent video scene.8
The context of New Hollywood is significant here. Studio directors of the late
1970s were becoming increasingly open to sex, violence, swearing and other racy
content, and as a result the mainstream film industry was felt to be encroaching
further and further on territory that used to belong to genres traditionally associated
with B-producers, such as Blaxploitation, soft porn and monster movies.9 What was
left of the exploitation industry needed to find a new market niche, and a lot of it
ended up in STV. Producers and distributors traditionally associated with B-genres,

such as Roger Corman, were able to make the transition from theatrical B-
films/exploitation into an equivalent position at the bottom of the video hierarchy.
The discourses that frame STV in industry commentary and film criticism testify to
this legacy – STV is frequently referred to as a dumping ground for low-quality
productions, a criticism also levelled at B-movies. In this way, the cheap action flicks
and horror movies that dominated the video market represent the relocation of
residual forms of exploitation cinema from the big to the small screen.
THE STV AESTHETIC
Like all movies, STV releases have traces of their industrial history in their textual
organisation. STV aesthetics and STV economics are inextricably linked, though
neither is reducible to the other. What then is the relation between the industrial
context of STV – this peculiar interplay between a new distribution platform and
existing production cultures – and the formal qualities of STV movies?
Some industrial background on STV production may be helpful here. Production
budgets for most STV features are small by Hollywood standards, generally ranging
from a few hundred thousand dollars to the low millions. This constrains production
quality but makes it much easier for these films to make their money back. Many STV
erotic thrillers of the 1990s could turn a profit on the basis of 15,000–20,000 sales,
which was not difficult considering the number of video stores and retailers in the
global market at that time.10 Low budgets also mean employing non-union casts and
crews, another characteristic of informal economies. Some STV producers are able to
negotiate labour agreements at 50 per cent of regular union rates.11 The smallest
companies usually bypass unions completely, which means that health and safety
regulations are less strictly enforced on set. As such, STV is a site of exploitation in
more than one sense of the word.
This has other implications. For one, it means that the STV industry is
geographically dispersed, because producers seek out savings by relocating production
to lower-cost sites. Much North American STV production takes place in Canada,
where labour and rents are cheaper than in Hollywood. Toronto is an important centre
for telemovies, while the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles is the hub for porn
productions. The STV labour force extends far beyond North America: films are
commonly shot in the Philippines, Thailand, Romania, Mexico and Canada. STV
movies are usually more likely to be made in these interstices of the global film
economy, or to feature one location masquerading (often unsuccessfully) as another,
or to feature an incoherent polyphony of accents and costumes.
This also affects the kinds of sets and locations that are used in STV movies, which
in turn structures the generic landscape of STV. For example, the villa/mansion on the
outskirts of the city is a staple of international STV movies and is frequently used as
the venue for X-rated rendezvous, drug deals, or shoot-outs. This architecture is a
hallmark of countless B-grade action films. Wide staircases, glass brick walls and
minimalist white decor all connote 1980s glamour without being detailed enough to
distract from the spectacle of sex or gunplay. Cheaper than a studio soundstage, the
villa/mansion is a production cost-saving device which over time has become a generic

hallmark. Likewise, the numerous STV films shot in Toronto are easy to spot – there is
a ubiquitous cloudy sky. This is another quirk of production: the muted Ontario light
lends many of these films a uniform greyness, and shorter shooting schedules mean
crews cannot wait around for sunny days.
As these examples demonstrate, many of the films designed for this market have a
common feel to them, no matter their generic identity. But genre is still very
important to STV’s internal industrial organisation, as it demarcates production and
reception in specific ways. There is no room for generic ambiguity in STV: producers
specialise in particular genres – action, horror, kids’ movies – and stick within these
boundaries. More than any other sector of the film industry, the STV market bases its
continued existence on the voracious appetites of genre buffs for whom the number of
films released theatrically each year is never quite enough. An STV film is doomed to
failure if it cannot fit easily into one particular section of the video store. This is a film
culture that doesn’t expect or even desire the exceptional; the important thing is that
the film covers the right generic bases. Thus, when critics berate STV movies for being
unoriginal, they are missing the point. STV does not attempt to compete with the A
circuit – it has its own logics and pleasures. Normally used as an insult in film
criticism, the term ‘derivative’ is a compliment in STV, for the key to market success is
the efficiency with which a film can internalise and respond to the norms of its genre
and the expectations of its audience. Like the Poverty Row studios of the classical
Hollywood period, STV producers specialise in giving audiences what they already
know they like (and nothing more).
STV has also spawned its own speciality genres, which owe their existence to video
distribution. Martial arts movies and the erotic thriller are two STV favourites, as they
are cheap to produce and have global ‘playability’.12 Another is the kind of ‘mockbuster’
movie made by US production house The Asylum – examples include Transmorphers
(2007), The Da Vinci Treasure (2006), AVH: Alien vs Hunter (2007) and Snakes on a Train
(2006).13 STV is also known for its endless sequels, which offer lower-budget leveraging
of franchises like American Pie (1999) and Bring it On (2000). And pornography, of
course, is the most important STV genre of all. Adult movies helped to drive VCR take-
up and they still make up a large chunk of the STV market, although the informal
nature of the porn industry means that it is impossible to quantify this exactly.
STV has its own star system, which cross-pollinates with the Hollywood A-list as
well as with modelling, tabloid culture, the music industry, wrestling, bodybuilding and
sports. On the one hand, there are some actors who seem to work exclusively within
STV and are famous in this field without ever having had much of a presence in ‘real’
movies. One classic example is Cynthia Rothrock, world karate champion and star of
innumerable B-grade martial arts flicks that went direct to video in most nations.
Other stars are more mobile and can move in and out of STV at different points in
their careers. The recent films of Steven Seagal – once one of the biggest names in
action cinema, now the star of cheap transnational B-movies shot in Romania
(Mercenary for Justice [2006], Flight of Fury [2007]) – exemplify the latter trajectory. It
is often said that in STV you’re ‘on your way up or on your way down’, a quip which
alludes to its function as both a breeding and dumping ground.14 For some actors, STV
is a self-enclosed field in which careers can be built and maintained, while for others it
functions as a springboard, temporary refuge, or final destination.

Let me illustrate these trajectories in and out of STV with two examples. Prior to
her death in 2007, tabloid heiress Anna-Nicole Smith starred in several STV and made-
for-TV features including the action films To the Limit (1995) and Skyscraper (1996),
both of which are still commonly found in the bargain bins of discount retailers.
Featuring taglines such as ‘Her code name was Colette, her mission was danger’, these
movies were clearly not made with the critics in mind. Equal parts soft porn,
melodrama and B-action, they function essentially as vehicles for a celebrity whose
star-text traversed gossip mags (the J. Howard Marshall marriage and inheritance),
modelling (for Guess Jeans and other companies), reality TV (The Anna Nicole Show
[2002]) and the tabloid/paparazzi culture in which she felt most at home until her
untimely death in 2007. A different kind of STV trajectory can be found in Dennis
Farina, a character actor (and former police officer) who specialises in playing
detectives. Farina has starred in ‘quality’ TV and cinema like NBC series Law and Order
(1990–2010) and several films by Michael Mann (Thief [1981], Manhunter [1986]),
while also showing up in innumerable bottom-of-the-barrel telemovies and STV
features: Street Crimes/Dead Even (1992), Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel (1992), The
Corpse Had a Familiar Face (1994) and so on. As such, Farina has a different kind of
STV presence from Smith and a different kind of mobility. This speaks to the
coherence of the ‘STV star’ as a category in contemporary popular culture, as well as to
the diversity that exists within this category.
Another common feature of many nontheatrical movies is a specific kind of
narrative structure and pace, revealing roots in television rather than cinema. Many
STV films are in fact made-for-TV movies – movies of the week, telemovies, late-night
features – which have been repurposed for video or DVD release. There is a close
structural connection between the made-for-TV and STV production sectors: cable was
the biggest source of funding for independent production until the STV boom of the
mid-1980s, but in many cases they worked in tandem, each providing partial financing
to producers.15 The expanding video market allowed made-for-TV producers to give
their films a second ‘window’, increasing their commercial value. Hence the difference
between movies and telemovies is very blurry in STV culture, and texts have a lot of
mobility between these categories. This overlap between TV and video registers
textually, as many nontheatrical films are punctuated by fade-to-blacks where the ad
breaks would have been, testifying to their previous incarnation as cable movies. A
generic B-grade STV movie like The Fatal Image (1990) – which on closer inspection
turns out to be a telemovie recut for video release – has a distinctive narrative
structure, with minor hooks every fifteen minutes or so to keep the audience from
changing channels during the ad break.16 This ‘tainted’ nature of the STV film is one of
the reasons it has been subject to so attention little within film studies scholarship.
TRANSNATIONAL STV CIRCUITS
At first glance, the global STV market seems to be as thoroughly dominated by

American product as the theatrical market. There are few parts of the world in which
someone like Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris is unknown. I have watched low-budget
American action and horror films on buses in Poland, at state-run theatres in Cuba, in

chain video stores in Serbia and at video bars in Sri Lanka. However, STV is actually
less American than it appears, both at the level of industry structure and textual
content.
The presale system of financing, used widely in the STV economy and elsewhere,
has been central to the internationalisation of STV production and distribution.
Presales involve one-off payments from various international investors on the basis of
a pitch for a future film, which is then used as collateral to finance the funding of the
film. This is not a profit-sharing system but an outright sale. Distributors acquire
exclusive rights for their territory and retain all revenues generated there. This
method of financing was pioneered in the early 1970s by Dino De Laurentiis and the
Dutch banker Frans J. Afman, a former cavalry officer turned movie mogul who,
according to Sight & Sound, ‘epitomised the decade of revolving credit facilities that
kept in contention a series of companies who made the movie business fun’.17
Afman and the French bank he worked for, Crédit Lyonnais, would become major
players in independent film financing throughout the 1980s and 90s. His presale
model was adopted by many independent film-makers, including more than a few
Hong Kong producers.18 Here is how the system worked in practice for the Cannon
Group, the company behind films such as the Charles Bronson Death Wish (1974)
sequels, Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra (1986) and numerous Chuck Norris movies:
Often with no more than a catchy title and a star name, together with the now familiar,
hurriedly-prepared and lurid Cannon poster, [Cannon co-owner Menahem Golan] would
describe the film to foreign independent distributors. If they liked the sound of it, they would
open a letter of credit with Cannon, the agreed sum payable only on delivery of the finished
film to their territory. Cannon then took these letters to Credit Lyonnais who advanced 75%
of the letter of credit’s paper value, accepting the letter as collateral provided it came from an
accredited source. Golan would often boast that these presales put projects into profit before
they even commenced production … Golan claimed that foreign distributors would soon come
to know that they could rely on the delivery of a Golan/Globus production and that if they
happened to lose money on one film, then another down the line would make up for it.19
Film critic Roger Ebert’s account of a Cannes meeting with Golan gives a further sense
of how such deals were put together:
When I was in Menahem Golan’s hotel room at the Cannes film festival … he had one entire
wall covered with this giant chart and shown down the left-hand side were names of 27
would-be movies, or possible movies, and across the right of the chart were 60 different
territories like Italy, France, but then also Angola, Zambia, and then they had gold stars. It’s
like bingo. When a movie has enough gold stars, it’s been sold in enough markets with
advance payments or guarantees, then they’ve got the money to make it, then they make it
and ship it out.20
As these comments suggest, presales were an effective way for small companies to
make back their production budgets and hopefully turn a profit. Unlike the complex
revenue-sharing formulae used by the major studios, presales were quick, simple and
easy, and provided a form of financing for films that might not have been made

otherwise. These flat-fee payments precluded the possibility of the producers

participating in the ongoing returns of hit movies, but in most cases preselling proved
to be a lucrative arrangement for both parties during the video boom period. For Dino
De Laurentiis, presales accounted for between 65 and 72 per cent of the budgets of his
productions,21 and we can assume that the figures would have been as high, if not
higher, for a company like Cannon.
As the point at which ‘First World production is most directly inscribed by global
tastes’,22 presales contributed in an important way to a deep internationalisation of
the video industry throughout the 1980s, which was felt both in the USA and
elsewhere. Michael Curtin argues that the presale system led to Hong Kong films
developing a kind of pan-Asian quality, and that this was especially the case with
action films.23 Ding-Tzann Lii goes further, suggesting that the presale system used by
Hong Kong producers, and the corresponding sensitivity to regional tastes that such
deals required, endowed Hong Kong movies with a unique ‘yielding’ quality – the
ability to adapt to local tastes, to conform to a regional imaginary, to ‘Asianise’.24 As
Lii and Curtin note, presales required films to be culturally translatable to the
maximum degree, which is partly why the visual spectacle of the action genre is well
suited to this financing method.
Many video independents also made use of foreign tax shelters to boost their
bottom lines.25 This was another factor in the transnationalisation of the video
industry from the 1980s onwards. Cannon used an offshore haven in the Dutch
Antilles where the effective tax rate was between 1 and 3 per cent; however, this meant
that the money they funnelled through this tax haven could not be returned home
unless they were willing to pay higher US tax rates.26 Investing in offshore production
was one way around this problem. As a result, Cannon shot war films in the
Philippines (Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection [1990]), superhero movies in
Canada (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace [1987]) and dramas in Australia (Evil
Angels/A Cry in the Dark [1988]).
The Italian Black Cobra (Cobra Nero) series from the 1980–90s (Black Cobra
[1987], Black Cobra 2 [1990], Black Cobra 3: Manila Connection [1990] and Detective
Malone/Black Cobra 4 [1991]) provides a useful example of how these industrial
dynamics shape film form. Featuring poorly dubbed English dialogue, these
ultra-low-budget exploitation films brazenly rip off elements from Cannon’s
aforementioned Stallone vehicle Cobra and also borrow from Dirty Harry (1971),
The Dead Pool (1988) and Die Hard (1988). American footballer-turned-action star
Fred Williamson, best known for his roles in the Blaxploitation classics Black Caesar
(1973) and Three the Hard Way (1974), stars as a renegade Chicago detective who
takes the law into his own hands. Over the course of the series, Williamson’s
character Robert Malone takes on a gang of bikies, a rebel army and two Islamic
terrorist cells, dispatching them with poorly shot karate and cheesy one-liners.
The first Black Cobra is shot in Rome but set in Chicago; the later films are shot
and set in the Philippines (the narrative pretext: an Interpol officer exchange).
They star a motley collection of American expats, European B-movie regulars and
local extras.
The Black Cobra films are textbook examples of the STV tendencies described here.
They are ultra-cheap productions that confound even the most basic norms of

narrative cinema: the editing is disjointed, the plot incoherent and the dialogue is
dubbed in post-production, Italian-style (at one point a boy speaks with the voice of an
old woman). Black Cobra 4 does not even star Fred Williamson as claimed: the
producers simply recut the first film, added some new footage and passed off the result
as a new production. The transnational production of the films takes full advantage of
cheap Asian labour, yet much of the demand for these films comes from the traditional
action markets of East Asia, France, Italy and Eastern Europe.27 The Black Cobra series
and hundreds of other similar 1980s STV action films emerged from a once-booming
network which spanned several continents and employed thousands of people, a
shadow cinematic economy which is not opposed to Hollywood but is, in important
ways, structurally disconnected from it.
Meaghan Morris has offered a compelling analysis of the transnational dimensions
of North American STV martial arts movies. Hers is one of only a handful of published
studies on this topic,28 and it offers a useful model that can be extrapolated to other
STV genres. Nominating the years 1985–93 as the dominant period of STV action,
Morris performs a virtuoso reading of the intertextual politics of these films, which
draw heavily on Hong Kong kung fu movies and are typically funded through
international presales. She describes STV action as a ‘minor’ cinema, in the Deleuzian
sense of being a different, yet overlapping, way of ‘handling the same material’ as A-
grade action. The minor action mode involves such things as transnational film crews,
fast shooting schedules, cheap shooting locations (often in the third world), a ‘ “sleazy”
look’ and informal modes of exhibition.29 STV action cinema is transnational both in
its content and its distribution, which circulates ‘scenarios of “contact” between rival
ways of life to diverse audiences worldwide’.30 Morris also suggests that there is a
cross-cultural class imaginary to be found in transnational action which revolves
around narratives of ‘emulation’ – the process of learning from a master (a common
trope in martial arts films).
This raises the question of how to critically interpret the transantional linkages
that characterise STV production and distribution. There is a tendency within
political-economic analyses of offshore production to read media flows from the
‘West’ to the ‘rest’ as beholden to the logic of global capital. A prominent example
of this argument is Toby Miller’s New International Division of Cultural Labour
model, which argues that the internationalisation of Hollywood production is a
cost-saving race to the bottom, involving the relocation of labour-intensive
production to low-cost third world sites, with profits returning from the periphery
to the centre.31
While offshoring in film industries clearly has an economic basis, there are also
other questions that we can ask about the trajectories and implications of these flows.
It is especially important to consider what happens to these models when we shift our
gaze to the production strategies of non-Hollywood players. In the STV field, the USA
performs an aggregating function, linking up the various elements and attempting –
where possible – to centralise distribution, but the STV landscape is still highly
heterogeneous. The following profile of an Antipodean STV production/distribution
outfit looks in more detail at some of the periphery-to-periphery flows that are
common in STV economies.

SHOOTING AND SELLING STV ACTION IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC
International Film Management was a production company headed by the Australian

producer Antony I. Ginnane, who has produced sixty feature films – mostly low-
budget STV titles – since the late 1970s. Its successor, Ginnane’s California-based
company IFM World Releasing Inc., distributes these films on DVD along with a
variety of other STV and made-for-TV titles. Ginnane (who used to joke that his
middle initial stood for ‘International’32) is an aggressively global producer who has
long advocated the internationalisation of the Australian film industry. His
production and distribution strategies, described below, are indicative of STV’s
border-crossing tendencies.
Ginnane’s film activities began in the early 1970s. After an unsuccessful directorial
debut with the 1971 European-styled art film Sympathy in Summer, Ginnane shifted
into a producer role and decided to target the exploitation market. Working with
directors such as Richard Franklin and Brian Trenchard-Smith, Ginnane released a
large number of genre movies with abundant nudity and violence throughout the
1970s and 1980s. These included the erotic adult comedy Fantasm (1976), the horror
flicks Patrick (1978) and Thirst (1979) and the notorious Turkey Shoot (1982), famously
described by the prominent Australian critic and broadcaster Phillip Adams as ‘a film
of unrivalled sadism and brutality’.33
These were all low-budget films designed to play well in overseas markets.
The emphasis was on visceral entertainment, and they represented a radical
departure from the government-funded Australian cinema of the 1970s and 80s.
Most of Ginnane’s features are faithful contributions to established exploitation
sub-genres with global ‘playability’, such as the vampire film the martial arts film
and the humans-as-prey film. He also cast overseas leads in his movies to boost
their international sales, much to the anger of local actors’ unions. The idea was
to move Australian film-making closer to the fast-and-cheap model of American
B-cinema.
The role played by the Australian ‘10BA’ tax law is important here. IFM was one of
the key beneficiaries of 10BA, a tax write-off scheme which was introduced in 1980 by
the federal government and which had the effect of funnelling huge amounts of
private money into the Australian film industry. Scaled back in several stages
throughout the 1980s, 10BA enabled many investors to realise profits by securing flat-
fee international presales. The video market allowed what Ginnane described as ‘no-
star average’ features to rake in, on average, advance sales of around AU$500,000 for
US home entertainment rights and AU$350,000 from other territories.34 These two
factors ushered in a type of prolific, fast-and-cheap film culture that has not really
been seen in Australia since, and they also contributed in significant ways to the
internationalisation of the Australian film industry by encouraging producers to seek
presale deals abroad to underwrite their projects.
During the late 1980s and early 90s, Ginnane made a number of action films in the
Philippines. These include the supernatural horror film Demonstone (1989), the
hostage/action feature Savage Justice (1988), the action/sci-fi film Driving Force (1989)
and the Vietnam War movies The Siege of Firebase Gloria (1989) and A Case of Honor
(1991). These productions were thoroughly international affairs:

These films, all around [AU]$1 million, were funded by US and Australian banks (including
NZI Securities) and presold to US distributors like J&M, Atlantic, and Fries Entertainment.
Again generally genre pictures, they were based on Australian scripts, used some Australian
directors and key crew and US actors, and otherwise used Filipino crew and facilities, although
post-production was done in Australia. The move to the Philippines was clearly designed to
take advantage of the lower labour costs and to bypass union problems in Australia.35
Ginnane himself is very candid about this prerogative, describing the Philippines as ‘a
low-cost production centre where we could maximise production for minimal costs’.36
The strong history of local production was a factor in this decision, along with the
landscape (the jungle settings could stand in for numerous Asian locations), the
success that Roger Corman had with his Philippines productions and a number of
other commercial connections Ginnane was developing at the time which involved
expanding the IFM distribution network into South East Asia.37 The Philippines
productions were made in partnership with two Manilan entrepreneurs, Marilyn Ong
and Rod Confessor, with whom Ginnane founded the spin-off company Eastern Films
Management. Ginnane also had extensive dealings with the British actor and producer
David Hemmings. Hemmings was the co-founder of Hemdale, another independent
production and distribution company catering mostly to the home video market.
(When Hemdale went bankrupt in the late 1980s, this almost sank Ginnane as well.)
Hemmings also directed several IFM films, including Race for the Yankee Zephyr and
The Survivor (both 1981).
The distribution of IFM films tells a similar story. Via presale deals with small
distributors including the UK/Irish outfit Liberty, the US independent Vestron and
Roger Corman’s New World, many IFM films achieved a thoroughly global presence in
the video market without the benefit of a distribution deal with one of the majors. The
following passage, taken from Ginnane’s autobiography, gives a sense of the sales
environment for one of his films at the time:
Germany was sold to Highlight for $125,000; the UK (video only) to Braveworld for $110,000
with Sky picking up UK pay TV at $30,000 per title. Pacifica in Japan paid $70,000 each and 2
competing companies in Spain bought the 2 titles for $25,000 each. Other territories initially
licensed included Israel, Portugal, Korea, Greece, Turkey, South Africa, Sweden, Middle East,
Taiwan and Central America. Filmpac took Australia on both titles and paid $85,000 for the
pair.38
Like the Hollywood studios that reduce costs by offshoring the labour-intensive parts
of productions to developing nations, IFM took full advantage of its place within a
globalised film production ecology. Over the years Ginnane has also offshored to other
low-cost destinations including Mexico, Canada, Lithuania and the former Yugoslavia.
He nominates Bulgaria and the Ukraine as countries that represent particularly good
value for money today.39
But IFM is an Australian-run company, working from a peripheral position in the
global film economy – or, in the case of Eastern Films Management, in partnership
with Asian industry players. This represents a parallel rather than a centrifugal
trajectory, a movement from one film industry periphery to another, which is

nonetheless beholden to the same commercial logic that underwrites other kinds of
international offshoring and outsourcing. The account of the Philippines productions
that Ginnane provides in his autobiography testifies to the informal nature of the STV
sector – films were made on the fly in unpredictable conditions, with slim budgets
allowing little margin for error. Ginnane preferred to operate this way in order to keep
costs down, and he understood that STV audiences were forgiving of low production
values provided that films adhered to generic norms by offering the required number
of explosions, car chases and topless girls.
The international flows generated by STV production and distribution are piecemeal
and subterranean, rather than global in the grand sense. They ape Hollywood in terms
of form and genre, but they operate outside the studio system. The transnational
dimensions of Ginnane’s Philippines-produced films are inescapable: the mixed-race
cast and crew, the polyphony of accents, the curious cultural elisions that occur when
‘local’ talent is recruited onto international productions.40 In other words, the films
bear the legacies of their production and distribution context at a textual level, and they
are not directly comparable to the kind of Global Hollywood productions which seek to
suppress these histories by making one place stand in for another, as was the case with
other Philippines-lensed US productions such as Platoon (1986). This is not to say that
this kind of periphery-to-periphery offshoring does not have its own problems, but it
does add weight to Morris’s argument regarding the textual transnationalism at work in
minor action cinema.
The example of IFM illustrates the ‘fast and cheap’ production model of the STV
market. Companies working at the bottom end of the STV market seek out small
market niches, provide a low-cost product and rely on a model of steady, small-scale
turnover rather than ‘tentpole’ mega-success. Success in STV is difficult due to the
high levels of competition and the undercapitalised nature of the sector – finding
secure financing was always one of IFM’s biggest challenges – but the nature of the
audiovisual market is such that there is usually a small but healthy market for low-
budget genre films, even if this has diminished since the heyday of home video. It is to
the perceived cultural value of this vast body of STV production that I now turn.
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF CINEMA
In his work on popular fiction, the Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti raises a
question of great importance to both literary studies and film studies – one which an
analysis of STV may help to answer.41 Moretti’s essay ‘The Slaughterhouse of
Literature’ begins with a lengthy list of book titles, all long-forgotten nineteenth-
century detective stories that never made it into the canon of crime fiction. These
obscure texts are the departure point for his retheorisation of literary value – they are
the ‘forgotten 99 per cent’ that make up the bulk of literary production, the bulk of
popular consumption, yet which are rendered invisible by the optic of literary studies
and its fetishisation of the exceptional:
The history of the world is the slaughterhouse of the world, reads a famous Hegelian
aphorism; and of literature. The majority of books disappear forever – and ‘majority’ actually

misses the point: if we set today’s canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred
titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published
novels.42
For Moretti, canons are merely the tip of an iceberg whose submerged bulk is an
equally interesting object of analysis. This vast literary wasteland provides answers to
questions of cultural value. For example, why do we read Arthur Conan Doyle today
rather than one of his forgotten contemporaries? What does the other 99 per cent of
literature have to offer?
Moretti argues that taking this excess cultural material seriously allows us to see
literary production in a more holistic way. His work employs quantitative methods in
an attempt to find patterns that can explain why some texts, writers and styles endure
at the expense of others, approaching literary production as a competitive field in
which textual conventions operate as forms of product differentiation. To illustrate
this principle, Moretti tracks the emergence of the clue as a formal device in detective
fiction of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how it operated as a kind of
evolutionary technology which writers either adopted or ignored at their own peril:
detective stories which used clues to engage their readers became dominant, while
those without faded into obscurity. Literature becomes a Darwinian battleground in
which styles, formats and genres are born and die off according to intricate laws of
textual competition.
Let’s take some of Moretti’s ideas and see how they can help us understand the
STV market. My suggestion here is that STV may be to cinema what long-forgotten
detective novels are to literature. As we have seen, STV movies make up the ‘invisible’
bulk of global production activity. STV also has the lowest discursive status of any kind
of film, being ineligible for Oscar nominations and for most other markers of
institutional recognition.43 The parallels between STV and the forgotten popular
fiction texts that Moretti describes are quite clear. What, then, is cinema studies to do
with this other 99 per cent?
Cinema studies is often burdened with a romantic idea of what cinema is and
should be – a grand imagination of film as a medium endowed with effects, potential
and magic. The scale of STV output renders this intimate relationship with the filmic
text impossible. How can one possibly care about, let alone watch, all those obscure
titles hitting video store shelves every year? Most of these films are not made to be
remembered or cherished; they are designed to deliver a modest amount of pleasure
and then to be forgotten. STV is the slaughterhouse of cinema.
This brings us back to canons and to the broader notion of cultural value. To whom
are STV films valuable? What kind of value are we talking about? Do canons articulate
STV value? Granted, in an age of niche markets, the film canon is larger and more
complex than the literary canon Moretti analyses. Despite the endurance of such
things as British Film Institute and American Film Institute Top 100 lists, film canons
today are far from uncontested and are constituted by an infinite number of sub-
canons (genre-specific canons, star-based canons, subcultural canons, guilty pleasure
canons, IMDB user canons and so on). Nonetheless, the importance of canonisation as
a discursive technology has not diminished; it is how critics, consumers and film-
makers alike make sense of the endless cinematic landscape, which is only ever

knowable in fragments.44 Individual STV films may be famous or infamous at different

registers of value. Some of them are genuinely loved; others are enjoyed in a tongue-in-
cheek way, for containing the worst special effects, the silliest dialogue and so on. But
most come and go without making any kind of impact. In STV we have a cultural form
based on the pleasures of mediocrity, and this is why it is so difficult to theorise using
the traditional literary studies/cinema studies toolkit.
To call an STV film mediocre is to state the obvious. I do not mean this as a value
judgment in the manner of a publication like Film Comment, which snobbishly claims
that ‘[t]hough straight-to-video titles are inadequate in many different ways, the fact
of their mediocrity is reliable’.45 Mediocrity is also a mode of production. Consider the
following quote from Cannon’s Menahem Golan, speaking at the high point of the
1980s video boom: ‘Theatrical is not the only mouth to feed. If Hollywood produced
five times as many films as it does now, it would still not meet the demand. There is
space for the mediocre!’46 Given the kind of cheap, ultra-violent movies that Cannon
produced, Golan’s open embrace of the mediocre may come as no surprise. However,
this comment tells us something significant about STV, an industry that quite literally
treats the film as a cut-price commodity, something to be bought and sold and
watched and forgotten. In this ‘space for the mediocre’, the function and value of the
text are different. STV films are not individualised and autonomous in the same way as
theatrically released films; like the B-film or the early short, they are interchangeable
and disposable. As such, STV films are a curious combination of mass and flexible
production tendencies, pumped out in large numbers by small studios to a reliable
formula. In fact, their status as commodities echoes the kind of minor action
thematics theorised by Morris: like the anonymous henchmen in an action movie, STV
films come out of nowhere and are dispatched just as quickly. STV is so vast it is
unknowable; one is awed by its scope, but one also despairs at the thought of having to
care too much about these ephemeral texts. We return again to the same set of
questions. Do these films matter? In what ways do they matter? Should we care about
them? Should we attempt to preserve them?
The work of archivist and film theorist Paolo Cherchi Usai is illuminating on this
point. In his book-length polemic, The Death of Cinema, Usai invites a retheorisation of
cultural value in an age of audiovisual abundance:
It is estimated that about one and a half billion viewing hours of moving images were
produced in the year 01999 [sic], twice the number made just a decade before. If that rate of
growth continues, three billion viewing hours of moving images will be made in 02006, and
six billion in 02011. By the year 02025 there will be some one hundred billion hours of these
images to be seen. In 01895, the ratio was just above forty minutes, and most of it is now well
preserved. The meaning is clear. One and a half billion hours is already well beyond the
capacity of any single human: it translates into more than 171,000 viewing years of moving
pictures in a calendar year. Some may say that a good deal of that figure is produced by video
cameras monitoring bank counters and parking lots, but I do not. With or without security
monitors, the overall number of moving images we are preserving today is infinitesimal
compared with mainstream commercial production. In India alone several hundred films are
made a year, and only a tiny portion of them end in the archives. Television in developing
countries is produced on videotapes that are erased every few months. If so many of these

images come and go without our even hearing about them, then how in the world can we
form an idea of what cultural heritage is?47
This is the archivist’s dilemma: it is not possible to remember everything, so what

should be forgotten? What is the value of a film that no one, not even its creator, cares
about? After all, more than a few stars, directors and producers would be only too
happy to erase their STV years from the public record. Addressing this issue of scale in
all its complexity is beyond the scope of this book, but the vastness of the STV
landscape can help to throw the stakes of this problem into relief. If nothing else,
taking seriously the audiovisual excess that is STV can help us to think of cinema in a
different way – as something other than a genealogy of great directors, or a signifying
system, or a set of psychic effects; but rather, as an industrial field that exceeds
knowable limits. When seen from this vantage point, cinema’s shadow economies
move from the margins to the very centre of global film culture.
The inherent disposability of STV also has implications for the way we conceptualise
consumer choice, and I want to return now to the economic dimensions of STV for a
moment. Much cultural analysis takes it as a given that culture is consumed because it
is meaningful in some way to its audience. Scholars, including Moretti, look for answers
to the riddles of consumption in the text itself, assuming that the popularity of a text is
a function of its content. However, it does not always work like this in the movie
economy, and especially in the STV market. An STV film may sell purely because its
cover has been made to look like a recent Hollywood blockbuster (recall The Asylum and
its rip-off ‘mockbusters’ like Snakes on a Train, 18 Year Old Virgin [2009] and The
Terminators [2009]). Sometimes people buy STV movies because they are placed
strategically near the checkout of discount stores, or because they have seen every other
movie on the shelf at Blockbuster. As noted earlier, STV consumption is not (just) about
consumer choice and the fulfilment of psychic needs. It is also shaped by marketing and
distribution strategies, the effects of which are not always predictable.
STV throws other models of cultural consumption into doubt as well. I am thinking
here of Chris Anderson’s influential ‘long tail’ theory, which refers to the 80 per cent of
cultural production that is unpopular on an individual basis but massively popular if
viewed as a whole.48 Anderson argues that if consumers are provided with appropriate
search tools and access to a catalogue unfettered by warehousing constraints, they will
end up renting more obscure titles than they would be willing or able to at your
average Blockbuster. The interesting aspect of Anderson’s argument is that it too is
framed as a celebration of unfettered consumer choice rather than as an analysis of the
structuring effects of distributive technologies:
The lesson is that what we thought was a naturally sharp drop-off in demand for movies after
a certain point [along the demand curve] was actually just an artifact of the traditional costs
of offering them. In other words, give people unlimited choice and make it easy for them to
find what they want, and you discover that demand keeps on going into niches that were
never even considered before – instructional videos, karaoke, Turkish TV, you name it.49
This takes us some way towards understanding STV, which, with very few exceptions,
finds itself at the far end of Anderson’s long tail. But in Anderson’s approach, there

remains the presumption of a rational consumer actively making meaning through

consumption, as well as the presumption of underappreciated ‘quality’, which is to say
unextracted value, on the part of long-tail texts.50
This is not an accurate description of STV. Anderson’s model of consumption
works for self-consciously marginal cultural production with high levels of
(sub)cultural prestige – Iranian cinema, Takeshi Kitano movies and so on – but the
sprawling underground of STV is not really this kind of long tail. Many STV texts may
not be valued by anyone in particular, yet the industry as a whole continues to sustain
itself. STV is not a field of undiscovered gems: it is a space of surplus audiovisual
production. So while popularity is partly a function of distribution, I do not follow
Anderson in suggesting that there is an underlying ‘level playing field’ which can be
restored if we fix the distribution bottlenecks. Distribution is in fact constitutive of
demand, and of reception. The level playing field is a fantasy.
CONCLUSION
It is now time to exit the slaughterhouse in search of other terrains, but a recap of the
chapter’s key arguments is in order first. I began by pointing out the STV sector’s
centrality to the global film industry, noting its huge annual output of titles as well as
its absence from many indexes of global film business. The international dimensions
of STV financing were then discussed and a case made for the existence of a minor
form of transnationalism within STV films. STV films are limit cases for theories of
cultural value: they are comprehensible neither as art nor as mass culture; they are
simultaneously marginal and mainstream; they do not respond well to an analysis
based on notions of textual meaning, consumer choice, or subcultural consumption.
This journey into the STV slaughterhouse reminds us of the interdependent
relationship between production and distribution systems. Home video is not just a
stage in the value chain through which Hollywood product passes. It has produced its
own specific distribution model which in turn has given rise to whole new production
infrastructures, aesthetic forms, genres and consumption practices. As we have seen,
the major studios share the stage with an amorphous collection of fly-by-night
operators, many of which are thoroughly transnational in their industrial scope and
practice. From hereon in, we will be moving away from this particular kind of STV
culture and towards shadow film economies that bear even less resemblance to the
mainstream film business. The next chapter develops an analytical framework through
which these informal industries can be approached.

Pirated DVDs/VCDs on sale outside the Shatilla refugee camp in south Beirut, Lebanon (Paul Keller. Creative Commons licence)
3
Informal Media Economies
Beyond the infrastructures that constitute what we know as the international film
industry – multiplexes, film festivals, video stores, cable TV – lie other largely
unmapped terrains of film distribution. So far in this book, we have set out some
coordinates for such a map. Chapter 1 addressed methodological and conceptual
questions in distribution analysis, identifying the problems with industrial histories
that focus only on formal networks, while Chapter 2 shifted the analysis to a specific
interstice between the formal and informal film economies (straight-to-video
releasing) and the production cultures it has generated. From this point onwards, we
move further away from the formal film economy to consider the many distribution
networks that operate in loose articulation with or entirely outside this system. The
point of such an approach is to bring informal modes of distribution closer to the
centre of our analytical frame, where they rightfully belong.
One benefit of this reorientation is to place film industry studies into dialogue with
other traditions of research on the circulation of cultural commodities. Within fields
such as human geography, economics, anthropology and urban studies there is a rich
body of work on informal economic systems – from street markets and hawker networks
to large-scale criminal enterprises – which has generated fascinating models for the
analysis of distribution networks. In recent years media studies has begun to engage with
these ideas, led by the influential work of Ravi Sundaram, Brian Larkin and Jeffrey
Himpele.1 Yet much remains to be done, especially in film studies where there has been
relatively little contact with the literature on commodity circulation that can be found in
the social sciences. In this chapter, I revisit early debates about informal economies from
the 1970s and demonstrate how the insights they generate can be used productively
within analyses of film industries and networks. I then provide examples of informal
media economies of differing sizes and scales. The chapter concludes with a discussion of
the distribution of the 2007 Brazilian film Tropa de elite (Elite Squad), and its unique
trajectory through both legal and extra-legal circuits, illustrating not only the empirical
significance of informal distribution but also its articulation with formal systems.
THE FORMAL AND THE INFORMAL
Informal, or ‘shadow’, economies can be defined in a number of different ways, but in

general usage the term refers to economic production and exchange occurring within
Informal Media Economies 39

capitalist economies but outside the purview of the state. In its purest form, the
shadow economy is a space of unmeasured, untaxed and unregulated economic activity.
If the formal sphere is a space of order and oversight – ‘a world of salaries or fees paid
on time, regular mortgage payments, clean credit ratings, fear of the tax authorities’2 –
then informality is characterised by handshake deals, reciprocity, gift economies, theft,
barter and other modes of exchange and redistribution which bypass institutions.
Positive defining factors vary, but this idea – informality as a negative state, outside
the formal realm – is common to all definitions.3
Economists have long sought to quantify and monitor informal production and
exchange, usually with a view to bringing these flows into the formal zone of taxation
and regulation. In the late 1970s, research into the size of the shadow economy
captured the attention of policy-makers around the world. A widely read 1978 article
by Peter Guttman claimed that around 10 per cent of personal income went untaxed in
the USA. The following year Edgar L. Feige raised the stakes by putting the size of the
US ‘irregular’ economy at 27 per cent of GDP.4 Today, estimates of the size of the
informal economy in Latin American, Eastern European and African nations
frequently exceed 50 per cent of GDP.5 While these studies differ in scope and
methodology, the general point is clear: in many settings informality is a norm, not an
aberration.
A great deal of the debate in this field can be traced back to two papers which were
published in the early 1970s. The International Labour Office report Employment,
Incomes and Equality: A Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya,
published in 1972, was influential in attracting interest to the informality model as an
alternative to the discourse of unemployment, which presumes an industrialised
economy and regulated labour. The ILO report focused on workers engaged in forms of
production outside waged and salaried labour, and defined informality according to
the following six criteria:
a) ease of entry; b) reliance on indigenous resources; c) family ownership of enterprises; d)

small scale of operation; e) labor-intensive and adopted technology; f) skills acquired outside
the formal school system; and g) unregulated and competitive markets.6
Keith Hart’s 1973 study of informal economic activities among the Fra-Fra in Ghana
highlighted the role of the informal sector as an economic buffer and a means of
survival for communities whose needs were not being met by waged labour.7 For Hart,
the defining feature of economic informality was a low level of rationalisation. He
illustrated this through an ethnographic profile of one of his informants who, following
his discharge from the army, pieced together an income from a number of informal
sources, including a makeshift gin bar run out of his rented room. Subsequent studies of
the informal economy have developed this early analysis, with varying political
orientations. Research in the Marxist tradition tends to foreground the difficulties
faced by those excluded from participation in the official economy and the tactics they
use to survive.8 On the other side of the political spectrum, the Peruvian economist
Hernando de Soto controversially points the finger of blame for non-integration of
informal economic activity into formal structures at the overregulated nature of many
third world nations and their under-developed property rights systems.9

These various claims about the informal economy illustrate how slippery a notion
it is, and how it can be recruited into the service of different political projects. Critics
continue to debate whether informality is best conceptualised as a discrete sector of
the economy or as a mode of production, a symptom of neo-liberalism or a repository
of entrepreneurialism, a problem to be solved or a potential to be harnessed. Few,
however, dispute the fact that informality is ‘a fundamental politico-economic process
at the core of many societies’.10
There is a great deal of traffic between the formal and the informal over time and
space, and between different parts of a production or distribution system. Formal
economies can become informal and vice versa. The emergence of illegal supply chains
following the outlawing of alcohol in the USA is an example of the first trajectory, with
the National Prohibition Act of 1919 creating a booming underground market for
liquor. The formalisation of payday loans and other kinds of micro-financing is an
example of the second trajectory, as money-lending activities previously carried out by
loan sharks and gangsters mutate into a legal, multi-billion dollar industry.11
Informality is not just about crime and vice. It is also an appealing strategy for
multinational corporations at the core of the formal sector. Subcontracting, outsourcing
and offshoring often have the effect of moving labour activities partly or wholly out of
the formal realm. IT companies relocate labour-intensive manufacturing to shady
enterprises in the developing world, while trendy design companies in London or San
Francisco commission work from eager young freelancers at exploitative rates or ‘on
spec’.12 Even legitimate-looking products may have been produced using informal
labour – blouses sewn by outworkers in western Sydney, computer parts made in
invisible factories in export processing zones in the Philippines – before they enter the
formal realms of distribution and retailing in first world nations.
The same logic is at work in film industries. Hollywood studios operate largely in
the formal realm but film production still involves many kinds of informal activity,
including unpaid cameo appearances, shooting in unregulated third world sites and
harnessing the promotional power of fans.13 Film financing has long been a ‘grey’
economy, with money funnelled in from an array of disreputable sources. In 2010 it
emerged that Saadi Gaddafi, wayward son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was investing
millions in US indie movies.14 In Mexico, it is rumoured that popular narcotraficante
movies – violent straight-to-DVD action films about the drug trade – are funded by
drug gangs. There are many other examples one could mention here, all underscoring
the fact that, in film economics, the formal and the informal are closely linked.
THE CENTRALITY OF INFORMALITY
Etymologically, informality appears to be a shadow, implicitly less central than its root,
formality. But this should not lead us to conclude that formality is some kind of
organisational constant from which informality departs. As Philip Harding and
Richard Jenkins argue,
an absence of formal regulation is the historical norm. History may be viewed as the
progressive encroachment of formality upon widening areas of social life, as a consequence of

literacy and the introduction of ever more sophisticated information technology, on the one
hand, and the increasing power and bureaucratization of the state, on the other.15
Hence the kind of regulating state that characterises formal economies cannot be
essentialised as some kind of universal presence. This is especially (though not
exclusively) the case when analysis moves beyond the industrialised, regulated and
consolidated industries and spaces that are characteristic of advanced economies. As
the urban historian and critic Mike Davis argues, much of the developing world (he
uses the example of the Congolese capital of Kinshasa) is characterised by a ‘figure-
foreground reversal of formality and informality’ which ‘reinvents the categories of
political economy and urban analysis’.16 The assumption that formality is the rule –
when, in many places and in many ways, it is the exception – is implicitly ethnocentric.
It is also important to note that governments and formal enterprises can actively
produce informality. This is the logic at work in the de-regulation and privatisation of
state industries, as per the Thatcher era in the UK or post-Soviet Eastern Europe,
where the deliberate scaling-back of state involvement in industry gives rise to
‘flexible’ labour practices (including the offshoring of work to lower-wage
environments) and mass lay-offs (leading to unemployment and, in some cases, a
reliance on informal revenue-generating activities such as petty crime).17 A similar
effect is produced by many forms of strategic rationalisation. The replacement of
roving ticket attendants on trains with automated ticket machines, in the name of
efficiency, produces higher levels of fare-evasion; the removal of ushers from
multiplexes makes it easier to sneak into theatres without a ticket; and so on. Thus
informality can be produced through the withdrawal, as well as the absence, of
regulation and oversight.18
While criminal activities are typically informal, it should be stressed that
informality can be found on both sides of the law. Many informal activities are both
legal and reputable. Even the most regulatory-minded states stop short of banning
cash-in-hand babysitting or tutoring. Off-the-books trade in food, handiwork and
domestic services is also widely tolerated, so long as it remains at a small scale. Illegal
arms trading and tax avoidance, however, are clearly different matters. The
implication here is that informal activities are neither inherently good nor bad. It is
difficult to make any kind of moral claims about either formality or informality as an
organisational principle. Corporate espionage, after-hours tutoring, Sunday school
teaching, DVD counterfeiting, cash-in-hand lawn-mowing and methamphetamine
production are all equally informal. Given this, the few things we can say for sure
about informal economic activity are that it reduces the tax base of states, and that it
presents a problem for large-scale attempts to organise workers.19
To sum up, there is little to be gained from the wholesale condemnation of
informality, as the informal sector is a means of survival for many millions of people
excluded from wage labour through no fault of their own. At the same time, we must
resist the temptation to celebrate informality for its own sake. There is a tendency in
some writing to fetishise informal economic activity as resistance against corporate
capitalism or a return to pre-industrial forms of community exchange and sharing.20
While acknowledging informality’s potential, we also need to stress that
informalisation is an important dynamic within the corporate sector, and that informal

economies – such as street trading and food preparation – frequently involve the
systematic exploitation of women, children and immigrants.21 One would be foolish to
make any claims about the inherent worthiness of either formality or informality as
ideals or empirical realities, given the diverse nature of the activities occurring within –
and crossing between – each realm.
INFORMAL ECONOMIES OF CINEMA
Having surveyed some of the general features of informal economies, we now return to
the question of how cinema fits into this landscape. The present section expands on
the distributive dynamics of the informal film economy, identifying some
characteristics that are common to many informal distribution circuits. As I noted
earlier, there are no inherent qualities shared by all informal systems other than a
degree of empirical invisibility or a tendency towards unregulation. Still, we can
identify a few features that are common (though not universal) among such networks.
For instance, many informal circuits have temporal qualities which differ from
those of conventional distribution structures. In the windowing system upon which
Hollywood and arthouse distribution models are based, the linear funnelling of
content through formats (theatrical to DVD to TV) monetises time, creating a
hierarchy of value based on a text’s newness.22 Informal networks do not use such a
model, preferring in general to get product to consumers as quickly and directly as
possible. Many informal circuits also have a qualitatively different relationship to
space. The established model of international film distribution divides the world into
discrete zones in which selected distributors are granted exclusive rights. Global
theatrical film releasing has developed around a diffusion model, in which new
releases premiere in the USA and move outwards through the western world before
ending their days in developing-world markets, although the model is now shifting
towards simultaneous global (day-and-date) releasing. Of course, legal parallel-
importing and illegal piracy operations mean that spatio-temporal separation of
markets is an ideal state rather than a reality; but at its core the mainstream
distribution model is about the orderly movement of texts across and within spatially
bounded territories.
In contrast, informal circulatory networks are largely subterranean, meaning that
texts move through space and time with a lower level of interference from copyright
law, taxes, tariffs and state censorship. As I write, the most obvious example of this is
the BitTorrent software used by hundreds of millions of consumers across the world,
which enables films to be transported over great distances at great speed and at
negligible cost. File-sharing is not completely outside the sphere of regulation, as
ongoing piracy prosecutions and network neutrality debates attest. However, it is
clearly at the informal rather than the formal end of the spectrum. Less dramatic
forms of deterritorialisation include the common practice among tourists and migrant
workers of transporting DVDs from home to host country in their personal luggage,23
a form of distribution which is regulated, in theory at least, by customs and
immigration laws but which results nonetheless in the movement of huge amounts of
media from one place to another without the help of official distribution channels. In

other words, there is a special kind of mobility at the informal end of the scale which
relies not on the muscle of vertically integrated conglomerates but on the movements
of large numbers of small actors.
Informal distribution is usually invisible – or at least less visible than its formal
counterparts – in the industrial indexes and data sets that constitute our empirical
knowledge of media flows. In Chapter 1, I noted that the Hollywood studios favour
complex accounting systems based on revenue-sharing, used to calculate and
redistribute revenues between producers, studios and retailers. This system works to
spread risk around and to provide commercial incentives for all parties. For it to
function effectively, huge effort must be put into gathering data about the
performance of individual films at various stages of their lifecycle. Enter technologies
of industry monitoring, which have a long history in Hollywood. In the studio era
‘checkers’ would lurk in cinema foyers to ensure exhibitors reported the correct
attendance figures back to distributors. In the early 1970s, distributors took aerial
photographs of drive-ins with infra-red cameras to check exhibitors were accurately
reporting the car count, and therefore the revenues collected.24 These technologies of
surveillance have now evolved to the point where rental transactions at suburban
video stores can be monitored in near-real time from the distributors’ headquarters.
There is a whole ancillary industry of media measurement and revenue monitoring set
up to facilitate this commercial surveillance. Companies including Rentrak and Nielsen
enable studio heads to access real-time data on how their movies are performing at
DVD stores in Wyoming or multiplexes in Wapping. This data is then fed back to
marketing staff, who use it to plan future release patterns and PR campaigns.
In the informal film economy, there are few comparable systems of accounting and
surveillance. No amount of market research can hope to make sense of the infinite
number of viewings that take place informally. This is true both in the pirate economy,
where monitoring is obviously very difficult, and in the lower reaches of the legal film
industry, where technologies such as point-of-sale tracking are less common and
industry-wide sales data less effective. In other words, the ability to monitor media
consumption drops off sharply as we approach the informal end of the distributive
spectrum. Many niche markets – including the Christian film industry discussed in
Chapter 2 – are the domain of small distributors and retailers which do not use the
sales tracking services of Rentrak and Nielsen.25 And, as we saw in the previous
chapter, straight-to-video distribution is typically based on flat-fee and presale models
instead of the revenue-sharing formulae which underwrite studio contracts and the
revenue-tracking technologies associated with them. As a result, there is less data
available on how these films perform. This is one of the reasons why some film
industries and cultures seem to fall ‘off the map’ of industry discourse. The further we
move away from the consolidated, rationalised accounting models of the formal Euro-
American film industries, the greater the degree of invisibility and variation. Recall the
Indian B-circuit distributors discussed in Chapter 1, which have little presence within
the industrial accounting systems of Indian cinema and which operate under informal
regimes of credit and commerce.26
Films circulating informally also tend to feature higher levels of textual variation.
Formal distribution is a domain of standardisation and ‘brand integrity’: multiplex
distribution offers the consumer an implicit guarantee that the experience of watching

Spider-Man 3 (2007) will be more or less the same whether you live in Singapore or
South Africa. Other windows in formal distribution offer different guarantees. When
we rent a DVD from Blockbuster we can usually be confident that we will receive the
film we have asked for, that it will conform to the requirements of its rating category
and that it will play when we insert it into the DVD player. As we move into the
informal realm, these guarantees fall apart. Texts in informal circulation accumulate
interference – additions, subtractions, inflections, distractions – as they move through
space and time. Commercial bootleggers and fly-by-night video companies have less of
an economic incentive to ensure textual standardisation, so films are frequently recut,
redubbed and retitled at will.27 Pirate markets are particularly susceptible to textual
change, and examples of textual fluctuations within illegal distribution are numerous.
Regular file-sharers know all too well that many of the movies circulating in P2P
networks come with unexpected extras like Russian dubbing or Dutch subtitles.
Bootleg DVDs sold in pirate markets may be illegally copied before final post-
production and have been known to contain alternative endings and unfinished
special-effects sequences (as in the rough cut of X-Men Origins: Wolverine with
unfinished CGI work, which was famously leaked onto the internet prior to its release
date in 2009). Even legal distribution has its risks, as evidenced by the wilfully
misleading cover images and taglines of low-cost B-movie DVD multi-packs, the kind
one encounters at discount stores, which substitute one star for another and inflate
cameo appearances into starring roles.
The implications of informal distribution go beyond availability and can
significantly shape exhibition and reception. Informally distributed texts are typically
consumed in the home or in social spaces beyond the cinema, and usually in a state of
distraction. In many of its manifestations, informal distribution produces a kind of
spectatorship which rarely resembles the encounter between autonomous text and
sovereign spectator imagined by psychoanalytic film theory. Film studies concepts like
immersion or suturing cannot be transplanted wholesale into the informal realm,
whose rhythms and texture often have more in common with television or radio than
cinema. Cinema is something that may be on in the background while you travel, eat,
sleep, socialise, or work. As Jonathan Crary has suggested, the way we respond to
visual stimuli has been disciplined over time by institutions and technologies, from the
pinwheel to the projector. Distraction needs to be understood not as the opposite of
respectful attention but as an ‘effect, and in many cases a constitutive element, of the
many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects’.28 Crary’s emphasis on the
historically constructed nature of ‘paying attention’ is helpful, as it is these norms and
practices which tend to break down in informal distribution. Here, one’s relationship
to other people in the viewing space is as important as one’s relationship to the text.
The difference between many viewing situations arising from informal distribution
and the idealised textual encounter of classical film theory is inescapable.
An extreme instance of informal cinema culture, one which erases textuality
altogether, has been described by the urban theorist Abdoumaliq Simone.29 In a
remarkable essay, Simone reflects on his experiences living in Cameroon and South
Africa, describing how African communities reconstruct meaning from material, social
and symbolic infrastructures in various states of dysfunction. He emphasises everyday
actions that respond to situations of scarcity through attempts to ‘multiply the uses

that can be made of documents, technologies, houses, infrastructure, whatever’.30 The

essay includes an account of ‘cinemagoing’ in Douala, one which would occupy a
position at the extreme edge of the spectrum of informality. As such, it provides a
powerful account of one of the myriad ways in which filmic infrastructures can be put
to social use. I quote from it here at some length so as not to remove the encounter he
describes from its context:
Not even two minutes from the Western entrance to the [Machouchou] quarter stand the
remains of what was once Douala’s largest cinema, now closed for the past several years.
Next door stands a four-storey building that once housed one of the city’s better Catholic
high schools, now moved to another more suburban location. The demise of both has a lot
to do with the relationship between them. The pupils would miss classes to attend matinee
showings next door of an endless fare of cheap kung fu movies. The young people would
barely pay attention to the films; it was more a place to smoke marijuana and have sex.
Some efforts were made to get the authority at least to close the place during school hours.
But this was to no avail, especially as the very popular soft porn showings at the weekends
drew crowds of local functionaries. While over the years the cinema had been stripped
clean – of seats, carpet, even major sections of the roof – the locked projection room
strangely remained intact. Given its proximity to Machouchou, the cinema was a
convenient hangout for neighbourhood youth, a beguiling place of refuge since, despite its
present locked down fortress appearance, its status as a gathering-spot of criminals was
well known to the police. But as far as I could make out, there were no raids, no arrests.
Unlike the high school kids, these youth actually came to watch cinema, perhaps as a
respite from just how much their lives had become clumsy imitations of third-rate movies.
The thing was that there were no movies per se to watch. Rather, they had managed to
attach the projector to a small generator simply to get it running and would then sit, often
for hours, watching the rays of light as they reached the surface of the screen. Afterwards,
they would get beers and have long discussions about what they had seen, arguing over
plot lines and characters.31
There is no place in mainstream film theory for this cinemagoing experience. It

rewrites the space of the cinema and its presumptive social functions, but also
displaces the text from its usual position at the core of film culture, in a way that may
help us to rethink some of the assumptions of text-centric film studies.
Another kind of argument about informality can be found in Arif Hasan’s accounts
of media networks in Karachi, where much of the population lives in informal
settlements.32 Extensive networks of small-scale private enterprise provide many core
services here, from education to public transport. Trade liberalisation has meant that
lifestyle commodities, including many media products, are now more affordable for
the lower classes. A new media landscape is emerging in the cracks of the established
system: an informal sector consisting of pirate video clubs, video halls, software
vendors and cable TV companies which provide various forms of audiovisual
entertainment to consumers priced out of legal markets. For Hasan, these new
consumer cultures illustrate the distance between ‘a First World economy and
sociology [and] a Third World wage and political structure’, with cheap and ubiquitous
media commodities softening the blow of increasing structural inequality. The role of

informal media distribution is to provide a ‘bridge’ between these various worlds, if

only at the level of fantasy.33
While the Douala story recounted by Simone suggests a role for informal media as
a phantasmatic infrastructure across which unrelated social practices may take place,
in the case of Karachi informal audiovisual infrastructures perform a mediating
function, linking economies and cultures through popular imaginaries. For Hasan,
informal media is a symptom of structural change, a side-effect of economic
liberalisation. This is a common characteristic of informal media markets, which
frequently present to their customers an affordable smorgasbord of audiovisual
options in places where other goods and services are in short supply. So while
celebrating the new forms of access that shadow networks open up, we must also be
aware of the wider political economy within which they operate.
INFORMALITY, CINEMA AND THE STATE
The relationship between informal distribution networks and the state is highly
variable. On the one hand, there are many informal networks that facilitate the
circulation of material blacklisted by governments. When this occurs in nations with
strong censorship regimes and questionable human rights records, it is often hailed as
an act of free speech, as something to be applauded. In their 1985 book Global Political
Fallout: The VCR’s First Decade, Gladys and Oswald Ganley provide some examples of
how pirate circuits were politicised in the Cold War years. They cite a secret US
government cable which expresses barely concealed delight over the prevalence of
video piracy in post-revolutionary Iran, noting that an ‘enormous black market has
come into existence to provide Western films for a high price to the middle and upper
classes’.34 One of the most popular bootleg videocassettes in Iran during the 1980s
was Footloose (1984), with its theme of ‘rebellion against fundamental religious
principles’. Piracy becomes, in this account, a driver of liberty and democracy. This is a
recurrent theme in news coverage of media systems under authoritarian rule. Many
American news organisations ran stories on the popularity of Titanic (1997) in
Afghanistan during the Taliban years, when pirate copies of the film were circulated in
defiance of the strict ban on all music, film and television.35
This argument about the ‘democratising’ properties of informal and pirate
distribution has been articulated in relation to non-Hollywood texts as well. Soviet
director Sergei Parajanov’s 1968 film The Colour of Pomegranates was never legally
released abroad as it displeased the Soviet censors, but a pirate 16mm version was
circulated in the UK and elsewhere. A screening of this pirate print at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London was almost derailed when Sovexport threatened legal
action, but as ICA director Chris Rodley said at the time, ‘what rights can they have
over a film they say never existed?’36 Likewise, the group of Chinese film-makers
known as the Sixth Generation directors, including Jia Zhangke (Pickpocket [1998], The
World [2004]) and Zhang Yuan (Beijing Bastards [1993], East Palace, West Palace
[1996]), have on many occasions fallen foul of China’s film censorship policies.37 Yet
their films circulate freely in pirate markets, in the PRC and elsewhere, demonstrating
that informal circuits offer a way around the regulation of official channels.

This way of looking at informal distribution tends to frame it as a resistance to

authoritarian repression. But there are many circuits which do not fit this narrative.
Consider a recent scandal in the Philippines, in which informal networks became the
conduit for a film containing graphic footage from a horrific mass-murder. In
November 2009, 57 people – including a local politician, his supporters and 31
journalists – were gunned down by an armed militia in the town of Ampatuan, in
Maguindanao province. The bodies were beheaded and mutilated; women were raped,
shot in the breasts and stabbed in the eyes. The massacre caused a huge scandal,
receiving news coverage across the country and internationally. Within a few weeks, a
DVD entitled Maguindanao Massacre 11/23/09 had appeared in pirate stalls.38 This
‘documentary’ featured four hours of footage of the crime scene clean-up. Viewers saw
body parts protruding from the dirt, exhumation of corpses from a mass grave and
other gruesome details. The DVD was marketed as a true crime exploitation video, and
Filipinos were outraged at the video pirates for cashing in the tragedy.
The origin of the Maguindanao Massacre 11/23/09 footage remains unclear, but
there appears to be some kind of link between pirates and the local authorities. This
serves as a reminder that while escaping conventional regulation, informal
distribution is not always entirely outside the sphere of the state or industry. There are
many other examples of state–pirate or formal–informal interdependencies that we
can mention here.39 A major research report into piracy in Russia notes a ‘web of police
and security-service protection’ for pirate disc factories, the largest of which are
housed within military bases and even nuclear power plants.40 Some of these factories
also produce discs for the legal market, and all are guarded by government security
forces. In the Russian economy, there are no clear lines between legal and illegal, public
and private.
A different kind of relationship between informal circuits and the state is discussed
by Anna Pertierra in her work on new media networks in Cuba.41 Despite strict
government control of broadcast, print, radio and the internet, Cubans enjoy a
surprisingly diverse media environment. A vast array of informally circulated content is
available, distributed mostly through personal networks and small media rental
businesses. A key technology of circulation is the portable external hard-drive. Hard-
drives are typically sent by friends and relatives overseas then used by Cubans as
repositories for film and TV content. Talk shows, music videos, feature films, anime and
HBO series are all widely available within days of their release or broadcast in the USA.
This economy is entirely informal, but it is not illicit. Hard-drive circuits in Cuba
facilitate entertainment: there is relatively little interest among Cubans in politically
sensitive material. For this reason, the Cuban authorities generally tolerate this
exchange, and most are personally involved in it. There is no formal system of
intellectual property in Cuba (it is considered anti-revolutionary) so pirate networks
operate with impunity. In recent years the state has even started issuing licences to the
pirate DVD rental operations.42 In this sense, informal networks are organs of
mainstream media rather than illicit exceptions. The relationship between these
cinematic shadow economies and the state is characterised not by hostility but by
tolerance, co-optation and interdependence.
Depending on the context, informal circuits can be spaces of resistance or
hegemony, art or propaganda, free speech or repression. At other times they are

everyday, banal phenomena. Their flexible nature means that all manner of content
can flow through them. As we have seen, they connect with formal state structures at a
number of levels. Rather than being a self-contained entity, the informal film economy
interfaces constantly with the state and with formal film industries. The following
section of this chapter offers a more detailed case study of an instance of informal
distribution in Latin America, its links to the film industry proper and its articulation
with other systems of urban informality.
BETWEEN FORMAL AND INFORMAL DISTRIBUTION: TROPA DE ELITE
The street economies of developing nations provide a rich source of stories and styles
for cultural industries catering to first world markets. In the wake of recent ‘slum
cinema’ hits such as Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Tsotsi (2005), we are seeing a new
visual vocabulary of the developing-world city emerging, structured around the
libidinal flows of the informal economy.43 Many recent Latin American films are
particularly invested in the spectacularisation of urban informality in the guise of
ghetto gunplay and block parties. In Brazil, ‘favela films’ like City of God (2002) explore
and aestheticise the affective dimensions of criminal economies.44
In 2007, the release of the Brazilian director Jose Padilha’s film Tropa de elite (Elite
Squad) provided a striking example of what happens when informality as a thematic
concern combines with informality at the level of distribution. The film’s unique
trajectory through the Brazilian market incorporated formal and informal elements,
moving between extra-legal and legal circulation over time. This movement between
informal and formal registers is also central to the film’s narrative, which explores
police corruption and the drug trade. An analysis of Tropa de elite’s distribution helps
to bring together some of the themes we have been exploring throughout this chapter
and throughout the book.
Set in the favelas of Rio de Janiero, Tropa de elite is the fictionalised story of a real-
life police squadron, BOPE (Special Operations Batallion), which is notorious for its
aggressive tactics. A big-budget, high-octane action movie, Tropa de elite combines
elements of social critique with exploitation cinema. It was massively popular in Brazil,
where it became the number one box-office hit of 2007. A sequel, Tropa de elite 2: O
inimigo agora é outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within), was released in 2010. However,
most of the film’s audience saw the original Tropa de elite well before the theatrical
premiere. In June 2007, four months before Tropa de elite came out in the cinemas, a
master tape was stolen and leaked on the internet. Pirate copies very quickly found
their way into thousands of street markets and informal stores in every corner of the
country, where they became very popular with vendors and customers alike.
Sociologist Augusto de Oliveira describes the scene at a central Rio market, the
Camelódromo Uruguaiana, thus:
For those of you who don’t live in Rio, let me try to explain what this place is like. The market
takes up a large block of land in the middle of downtown. It’s an ugly place, with hundreds of
stalls clustered beneath a steel roof that blocks out the light and the air, separated by
extremely narrow pathways. CD vendors blast out music at an almost unhealthily high

The informal economy as content and conduit: a scene from Tropa de elite (2007)
volume. It was here that I first saw pirate DVDs of Tropa de elite. Most vendors were selling
copies. Day after day, you could see the film playing on TV sets mounted on the sidewalk;
passers-by would stop to watch snippets of the film; and the vendors would promote the film
energetically and effusively – something I’d never seen before in my 15 years of coming
here.45
Research commissioned by a Brazilian polling company suggests that 10–12 million

people watched these pirate pre-release versions of Tropa de elite.46 There were even
fake sequels available in street markets, containing footage of police operations hastily
edited together by the pirates in an attempt to cash in on the film’s popularity.47 But
the greatest surprise was yet to come. In October 2007, when Tropa de Elite finally
opened in cinemas, it was hugely successful. It made more money at the box office
than any other film that year, including Hollywood behemoths like Spider-Man 3 and
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). People went and saw Tropa de elite for a
second or third time, and the massive word-of-mouth buzz around the film drew in
new audiences as well. Rather than sabotaging Tropa de elite’s box-office performance,
widespread piracy seems to have enhanced it.
The story of Tropa de elite connects with our discussion at a number of levels. First
there is the question of the spatial politics of the film’s distribution across both formal

and informal spheres. In Brazil, as elsewhere, distribution networks reflect and

reinforce social stratification. Many of the favelas in Brazil have no cinemas, theatres,
or other formal cultural institutions. Going to the multiplex is a privilege reserved for
the middle classes. The default means of engagement with the moving image is DVD
piracy and, increasingly, file-sharing.48 Tropa de elite was especially popular among
these favela audiences. Like the spatially segregated cities of Brazil, the distribution of
the film marked spaces differently according to socio-economic status. In the favelas,
Tropa de elite made its presence felt not just through the street vendors blasting the
film from TVs, the soundtrack wafting from shops and homes, the references to the
film in everyday conversation, but also through its take-up in popular culture. Children
re-enacted scenes from the movie in the streets, pretending to be BOPE officers.49 The
movie’s cover art became an integral part of the streetscape as it appeared in street
markets across the nation.
Tropa de elite may appear at first to be thoroughly localised: a Brazilian film, telling
a specific kind of story about Brazilian cities, distributed in a way suited to local
conditions. But its locality, both at the level of content and circulation, is filtered
through the global. Large, informal markets such as the Camelódromo Uruguaiana,
and hundreds like it around Brazil, overflow with cheap consumer goods imported
from China: clothes, technology, gadgets, electronic media, DVDs. The explosion in
consumer culture among the poor that has emerged in the last decade is, then, closely
linked to the globalisation of the Brazilian economy. In many of these commercial
zones, there is no clear distinction between the legal and the illegal. Goods, which may
be legally imported, are sold off the books. Many camelódromos also accommodate
street vendors who have been kicked off their former turf as part of urban
redevelopment initiatives, so informal trading practices run deep. Piracy is a natural
consequence. In other parts of the country, informal markets such as these are being
integrated into mainstream shopping malls, further blurring the lines between formal
and informal trading spaces and practices.50 These distribution networks are a vital
part of the Latin American mediascape. To dismiss them as pirate or criminal is to
overlook interdependencies between the formal and informal economies.
There is also the question of the instrumental productivity of pirate circulation.
The Tropa de elite story demonstrates the efficiency of street piracy as a distribution
model. In Chapter 1 we were reminded of the amount of work it takes to get a film
from post-production to its innumerable retail outlets. Brazilian pirate circuits were
able to mobilise this distributive muscle just as quickly through informal channels. The
fact that millions of people had seen the film within weeks of its appearance in street
markets suggests that the major studios are not the only players in film culture able to
rapidly assemble a mass audience for a film and to market it successfully to millions of
people. Tropa de elite’s surprising success at the box office also indicates that the
erosion of formal revenues is not a necessary side-effect of informal circulation. On the
contrary: buzz generated by piracy, as a form of free marketing, can in some
circumstances outweigh revenue ‘leakage’. Advocates of file-sharing often make this
argument, but the Tropa de elite incident provides some rare empirical evidence to back
up the claim.
It is still unclear who leaked the Tropa de elite master tape. According to one
rumour, the master was stolen by the military police, who had unsuccessfully

attempted to have the film banned by the courts on the basis that it was slanderous to
their reputation.51 In any case, a line of some sort can be traced between formal and
informal institutions. As in the film’s narrative, where police wages are subsidised by
bribes and middle-class law students fuel the drug economy by buying marijuana in the
favelas, the story of Tropa de elite’s circulation is characterised by interdependencies
between the formal and the informal.
The movement of Tropa de elite from the post-production studio to the internet to
the street to the big screen represents one kind of distribution trajectory. Elsewhere in
this book we have encountered circuits with a range of different characteristics. Some
formally produced texts slip into informal distribution shortly after their release,
circulating there while also making their way through the formal windowing system.
This is the case with most Hollywood blockbusters. We have also encountered
informally produced texts which remain entirely within the informal sphere for
distribution, as in the Maguindanao DVDs. Finally, we have observed distribution
systems which are informal as a result of their industrial invisibility rather than their
illegality, as in straight-to-video.
What these various circuits have in common is that they do not fit into the way of
thinking about distribution that we have internalised within film and media studies.
There is no orderly movement through release windows here, just the messy, multi-
directional scurrying of large numbers of small-scale distributive agents. In the next
chapter, we will look in detail at an informal media economy in West Africa which has
been able to harness the distributive power of pirate street markets, the bedrock of the
global informal media economy, to build the world’s fastest-growing screen production
industry.

Nigerian VCDs on sale in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam (Paul Keller. Creative Commons licence)
4
Nollywood at Large
Surveys of the international film business by industry analysts typically arrange the
world into a pyramid formation. At the apex, the seat of global cinema power, one
inevitably finds Hollywood – the world’s most profitable industry, producing the gold
standard of global entertainment. Below that is India, with its huge regional audience
and massive annual output, then Japan, China, France, Germany and so on down the
list. This way of imagining the international film industry is of course problematic, not
least because it reduces the complexity of global media flows to a competition between
self-contained national units. But there is also a deeper question here about what
counts as a national film industry in these surveys. The pyramid reflects a culturally
specific understanding of film business, based on a certain type of media economy
which generates empirically measurable data about feature production, international
sales and box-office returns. Industries which play by different rules are rendered
invisible.
Consider the exceptional story of the Nigerian film industry, often referred to as
Nollywood.1 This almost exclusively straight-to-video industry has grown
exponentially since the 1990s. While Nollywood production values are low, the level of
audience engagement is very high. In the mid-2000s an average Nigerian film was
selling about 30,000 copies – 150,000 for the most popular releases – with many more
copies circulating through pirate channels.2 But until 2009, when UNESCO listed
Nigeria as the world’s second biggest film producer, there was no formal
acknowledgment of the industry’s size or scale in international media statistics.3 Many
world cinema enthusiasts in the West are still unaware of the existence of this vast,
multi-lingual and extremely dynamic industry, which releases more than 1,000 films a
year – significantly more than the USA and, by some counts, India.
Nigerians, however, are in no doubt as to the popularity of their local cinema,
which is deeply integrated into everyday life and public culture. As film scholar
Onookome Okome argues, Nigerian video ‘has remained solidly at the centre of the
visual space in West Africa in the last twenty years, asserting its narrative presence as
well as building up an industrial infrastructure from the grassroots’.4 Demand for
Nigerian cinema is now widespread throughout Africa. Nigerian stars like Genevieve
Nnaji, Omotola Jalade Ekeinde and Ramsey Nouah have huge fan bases across the
continent and throughout the African diaspora.
The reason this booming film industry rarely appears in discussions of global
cinema is because it exists almost entirely in the informal realm. Nollywood’s
Nollywood at Large 55
distribution sector is controlled by an array of small-time entrepreneurs, pirates and

marketers (the local term for distributors), which has yet to congeal into major studios
and corporations as per the Euro-American model. Nor is there any formal structure
for international distribution, which means that Nigerian DVDs are difficult to come
by in the West outside diasporic African communities. Yet despite this structural
separation from global film business – or perhaps because of it – Nollywood has
flourished. Analysis of its structure reveals an alternative distribution template of
considerable potential, one grounded in informal rather than formal exchange.
To date, the literature on Nigerian video has been produced largely by
anthropologists and scholars of African cinema and literature.5 Dialogue between this
body of Nigerian video research and mainstream cinema and media studies is rare.6
Nollywood’s critical ghettoisation is a function of the obscurity of African cinema
within western media scholarship and the fast-and-cheap nature of the video medium,
which is not taken seriously by many film scholars. But Nigeria has a great deal to offer
current debates about film and media industries. As we will see in this chapter,
informality has been central to the success of the industry, with pirates building up a
vast regional audience for Nigerian films. However, as producers attempt to formalise,
regulate and consolidate the industry, informality is being recast as a threat to long-
term sustainability. This tension between formality and informality, latent in many of
the shadow film economies we have looked at thus far, is a defining feature of the
Nigerian video industry as it enters its third decade.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE NIGERIAN VIDEO BOOM
Nigerian video is a popular cinema, the first large-scale phenomenon of its kind in
Africa. Its birth in the 1990s came at the end of a long period of foreign domination
of audiovisual culture. Apart from the films of well-known directors like Ola Balogun
and Hubert Ogunde, most Nigerians had relatively little engagement with locally
produced movies during the 1970s and 80s, when 35mm and 16mm production was
at very low levels.7 This state of affairs was replicated across much of sub-Saharan
Africa, where Hollywood, Bollywood and Hong Kong films were all widely available
but African films were ‘foreigners in their own countries’.8 One estimate suggests
that African titles accounted for less than 0.1 per cent of titles screened on the
continent.9
This all changed with the emergence of video as an alternative to celluloid cinema.
Driven by the availability of imported video cameras and videocassettes, a new
industry emerged outside the established networks of film production, training,
distribution and exhibition. The first video hit was Kenneth Nnebue’s 1992 film Living
in Bondage, a melodramatic tale of greed and supernatural retribution, which
captivated audiences and became a pop-culture sensation. Living in Bondage and the
films that were produced in its wake had little in common with the tradition of 35mm
African art cinema associated with auteurs like Souleymane Cissé or Ousmane
Sembène. The aesthetic of these ‘video films’ was televisual, reflecting the training of
production personnel who learned their skills on TV sets rather than in the celluloid
cinema scene. The emphasis was on escapism, scandal and spectacle, with narratives

crafted around popular genres like supernatural horror and domestic melodrama.
Rough, cheap and crowd-pleasing, the early videos inaugurated a new cinematic
populism that has defined the character of Nollywood to this day.
As the video boom gathered pace in the mid-1990s, locally made tapes began to
appear in their hundreds in street markets across Nigeria. Shot quickly and cheaply,
the videos were often made by amateur producers with no formal training. As a result,
early Nollywood films were plagued by technical problems, especially poor sound,
crude editing and disorientating camerawork. But this did little to dampen the
enthusiasm of viewers who bought and rented these videos in great numbers.
Makeshift rental libraries appeared, their shelves full of VHS tapes with titles like
Glamour Girls (1994) and Deadly Affair (1995). By 1997, the video industry was
producing nearly a film a day.10 Today, the output is two or three times that. Films are
still scripted, shot and released within a matter of weeks, although production values
have risen considerably. Budgets extend up to US$200,000, sometimes higher – but
many films are still made for a fraction of this amount.
A common misconception about Nollywood is that it is one single industry. In
reality, the video economy is made up of a number of smaller entities – principally, the
Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and English-language industries – each with its own history and
organisational dynamics. As Moradewun Adejunmobi argues, the general trend across
Nollywood as a whole has been ‘a diversification of style and content motivated by the
emerging delineation of audiences for particular types of video film’.11 For example,
the Hausa films made in Nigeria’s Islamic north are conservative in their content and
favour Bollywood-esque romance with music and dance sequences (but no kissing).
Action and drama are the strong suits of the Igbo and English films, which tend to
have bigger budgets. In all cases, new narrative forms cross-pollinate with older genres
and formats, including Latin American telenovelas, the Yoruba theatre tradition and
popular African literary forms.12 Nollywood also has transnational as well as sub-
national dimensions, being integrated with the Ghanaian video industry, where it has
been claimed the video production model originated in the late 1980s.13 There is a lot
of traffic between these various cultural forms, with stars and story ideas in constant
circulation.
A crucial factor in the success of Nigerian video is its unique distribution model.
Most Nollywood films bypass cinemas and are acquired via informal markets, as is the
case with most commodities in Nigeria. Films are bought and rented at low cost from a
vast network of local markets, street stalls and small video stores, which stretches
right across Africa. The first Nigerian video-films circulated on VHS, but with the
emergence of digital disc formats distribution has shifted to VCD14 and, to a lesser
extent, DVD. No West African marketplace is complete without stalls selling
Nollywood discs, their covers adorned with attention-grabbing titles and photo
montages of stars.
Though labyrinthine, these distribution circuits are organised and efficient. Their
capacity for high-speed, low-cost circulation stems from the fact that they evolved from
pirate networks previously occupied with the sale of Hollywood and Bollywood
bootlegs. In his groundbreaking research on the Hausa video industry in northern
Nigeria, media anthropologist Brian Larkin explains how this system grew to
accommodate legitimate trade in videos and to return revenues to producers:
The everyday practice of piracy in [the regional capital] Kano was based around the mass
distribution of the two most popular drama forms, Indian and Hollywood films, and the
reproduction of televised Hausa dramas and Islamic religious cassettes. Nearly all of those
who might be described as pirates were at the same time involved in the duplication and sale
of legitimate media, and the organization that emerged made Kano the regional distribution
center for electronic media in northern Nigeria and the wider Hausaphone area (which covers
parts of Chad, Cameroon, Benin, Ghana, and the Sudan). The system is this: the main dealers
are based at centers in Kano, like Kofar Wambai market. They then sell to distributors in
other northern cities, and these in turn supply smaller urban and rural dealers who provide
goods for itinerant peddlers. The system is based on a complex balance of credit and trust;
and although it depends, in part, on piracy, it has evolved into a highly organized, extensive
distribution system for audio- and videocassettes.15
As Larkin notes, these informal networks have evolved into a distribution system for
locally made videos, with piracy built into this system at every level. While the northern
Hausa video industry differs in many ways from the Yoruba, Igbo and English-language
industries, the distributive logic is similar: pirate copies and originals intermingle in
distribution channels. Pirates are central to the system’s operations, as they develop
and maintain the distribution networks. There is massive revenue leakage, but enough
money makes its way back to producers via marketers to sustain production.
This is a very different model of distribution from the ‘windowing’ system used in
Europe and North America. There is no formal revenue-sharing in the video economy,
only handshake deals and commissions. The system is built on speed rather than
temporal staggering, the objective being to get films to market as quickly as possible.
Nollywood’s lack of formal structure presents problems for producers, as we shall see,
but the system has been a boon for consumers. Intense competition among vendors,
both authorised and unauthorised, makes for competitive pricing and speedy delivery.
Nigerian videos are typically watched among family and friends at home. The level
of VCR and VCD player penetration in Nigeria households is relatively high, and home
viewing is seen as a safer option than venturing out into the streets to go to the
cinema. Accordingly, distribution has evolved along almost entirely nontheatrical
lines. Movies typically cost around 400 naira (US$3.5), and can also be rented for
about an eighth of this price.16 Discs are passed around among extensive networks of
family and friends, and are commonly viewed in large groups, making participation in
video culture less prohibitive than the VCD price alone would suggest.
In addition, thousands of informal video clubs allow those without a VCR/VCD to
watch the latest Nigerian movies. A video club is simply a room with a TV, some
benches and an electric generator, maybe decorated with movie posters, where videos
are shown to crowds of locals every couple of hours. Entry costs around 20–30 naira,
less than US$0.25.17 Videos are also screened day and night at market stalls,
hairdressers, shops, bars and many other small businesses. Nigerian fans are known
for their willingness to ‘stand or sit nearly anywhere and anyhow to see the video
film’.18 In some of these spaces, access requires the purchase of a drink, a haircut, or
whatever else is on sale; in others it is free, although of course one has no control over
the environment and may be moved along at any moment. This kind of public
spectatorship is a central feature of the West African media landscape.

Audiences have multiple points of entry into video culture, and different social
groups have different access privileges. Many video clubs are male-dominated spaces
where women are not always welcome. But the level of video penetration in everyday
life is still very high: for most Nigerians – male or female, young or old – videos are
usually accessible by one means or another. This is especially so among city-dwellers
and the young, who passionately embrace video culture. The point, however, is that
the entire video economy would not exist without the agile distribution system upon
which the industry is founded. The cheapness and versatility of video and VCD
formats, a highly efficient and decentralised network of informal trade and intense
competition at the point of sale have helped to ensure that video culture is now a part
of everyday life throughout West Africa.
Nollywood is clearly unlike other film industries. There are no formal distribution
companies, just individual marketers and pirates, and in the place of cinemas there
are video clubs and street markets. This is why Nigeria has been overlooked as one of
the giants of global film culture. Nollywood bears little resemblance to the Euro-
American industrial model, and it does not produce the kind of data and industrial
knowledge that can validate the claims made on its behalf. As the anthropologist
John McCall argues, Nollywood is ‘radically horizontal in its organization’.19 This
flexibility has worked in the industry’s favour so far, creating a huge market for
locally produced content, but not everyone in the industry is happy with the current
state of affairs. Many producers now favour a more formal model, with less piracy
and stronger intellectual property enforcement. Momentum is building behind the
campaign for a more standardised and respectable Nollywood. In the following
section I consider how this drive to formalise the industry affects the distribution
sector.
THE FORMALISING IMPERATIVE
There can be no doubt that Nollywood is a big business. Its workforce not only
includes film-makers, creative personnel and distributors, but also a whole range of
ancillary industries and occupations. As Chukwuma Okoye argues,
the video film provides a counter narrative to not only the silencing of the ordinary people
but a remapping of the postcolonial social, cultural, and economic landscape by providing
both entertainment and employment, by lifting countless [Nigerians] out of debilitating
conditions, and offering viable possibilities for many more in other engagements. Without
dependence on imperial and local state agencies these films demonstrate their viability
through the many unemployed, poor, and hungry people, undoubtedly millions of them –
marketers and importers of video cassettes and CDs, the film producers and their
production crew, screen writers and actors, score composers, operators of the thousands
of video rental outfits all over the country, distributors, visual artists who design the
posters, printers, media practitioners, publicity outfits, journalists, even academics, and
countless others – whose standards of living have witnessed considerable improvement.
A great many of these professionals have attained the enviable status of urban
millionaires.20
As the visibility of the industry grows, so does the desire to quantify these multiplier
effects in more precise terms. The aim is to make Nollywood, a quintessentially
informal media economy, more amenable to conventional measurement and
accounting, bringing it into the formal realm. This initiative is part of a broader
attempt, driven by leading figures in the production sector and endorsed by the
Nigerian government, to generate a more reliable empirical framework for measuring
video income and exports. For this wing of the video industry, informality is
increasingly figured as a problem to be overcome.21
For example, many producers complain that they cannot secure conventional
financing for their movies – in the form of bank loans or guarantees – because bankers
distrust the opacity and informality of the current distribution system. As a result,
undercapitalised producers are at the mercy of loan-sharks, patrons and individual
investors who do not require such guarantees and have other ways of ensuring
repayment. Many producers argue that access to conventional financing would raise
the quality of Nigerian movies, allowing them to secure better distribution deals and
improving the Nollywood ‘brand’.22 Formalisation is seen as a solution to the
structural shortcomings that restrict Nigeria’s attempts to become a global media
powerhouse.
As Alessandro Jedlowski argues in an incisive analysis, the push towards a more
conventional industry model is being led by a sub-set of producers who wish to see
Nollywood shed its informal skin and become a mature business with global reach.
They want to see Nollywood movies sold on Amazon and iTunes, screened at European
film festivals and broadcast on cable networks. Most importantly, they want a formal
distribution system which will allow them to tap into to a potential goldmine: the
African-American audience. The aim is to create bigger-budget, conventionally funded
movies, and to integrate the rough-and-ready video industry into the world of formal
finance and banking.23
If formalisation is to succeed, stronger and more effective regulatory institutions
are needed. We are now beginning to see such institutions emerging, albeit slowly and
unevenly. The state regulator, the National Film and Video Censors Board, plays an
increasingly proactive role in industry development, building on its longstanding
censorship and classification remit. In addition, there is an evolving network of
industry bodies which make up a loose self-governance structure for the industry,
including the Association of Movie Producers, the Video Club Owners Association of
Nigeria, the Film and Video Producers and Marketers Association of Nigeria, the
Coalition of Nollywood Guilds and Associations (a new umbrella organisation) and so
on. However, the Censors Board and the various professional groups rarely see eye to
eye, and there is a great deal of conflict between and within the various institutions.
One area where the formalisation imperative is particularly visible is copyright
enforcement. Nollywood was built on piracy, but attitudes are changing as the industry
– led by the Nigerian Copyright Commission and its Strategic Action Against Piracy
(STRAP) initiative – attempts to shore up intellectual property protection for
producers. In 2003, a hologram sticker was introduced to distinguish legitimate DVDs
from fakes.24 In 2007, the industry trialled a licensing system for video clubs and
retailers with the aim of reducing piracy while at the same time gathering vital data
about the scale of the industry.25 Representatives of the producers’ associations now

monitor street markets to identify violations, and even major hubs of pirate
distribution like Alaba International Market are closing down unlicensed stores
(sometimes leading to shoot-outs with police).26 These measures have reportedly
expanded the zone of formal distribution from 500 to 30,000 retail outlets within a
few years, bringing a substantial amount of the distribution sector under state
regulation and measurement.27 However, these initiatives do not always work as
intended. The hologram initiative was abandoned after the government ran out of
stickers, and the video club licensing scheme has generated a huge backlash among
exhibitors, leaving its future in doubt.
In the last few years, there has also been a curious movement within distribution
back towards theatrical exhibition, which is seen as a zone of (relative) formality in the
ocean of VCD and video club piracy. This is a surprising turn of events, given the
industry’s proudly nontheatrical roots, but in the context of the formalisation
imperative it makes sense. Theatrical releasing of videos was first trialled in 1997
when Zeb Ejiro’s video Domitilla (a popular drama about prostitution) screened in
several Lagos cinemas in conjunction with cable airings on the African Independent
Television channel.28 Today, big-screen releases are becoming more common in Lagos
as top-end English-language movies – some of which are shot in 35mm rather than on
digital video29 – play in cinemas for extended periods before appearing on VCD. A few
titles even have premieres abroad before their theatrical seasons in the domestic
market. The general preference among the bigger producers is for a conventional
release pattern with individually monetisable windows. Piracy is reduced by delaying
the disc release until substantial theatrical revenues are recouped.
What are we to make of these efforts to formalise the industry? Is there a deeper
logic driving Nollywood’s formalisation imperative, one common to other film
industries? Is it appropriate to compare Nigeria to pre-1908 Hollywood, which was on
the verge of a long process of formalisation and consolidation beginning with the
establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company? While such comparisons may
be tempting, it is best to avoid constructing teleologies of industry evolution. Film
industries have different evolutionary paths, and formalisation is not the only possible
end-point for a ‘mature’ industry. Informality is still an integral rather than transitory
feature of the Nigerian video scene, especially in distribution, because this informality
is consistent with the broader political economy of West Africa and because it
facilitates the cheap and rapid circulation of videos in a way that no formal system
would be able to.
It is also important to consider the resistances to formalisation among producers,
distributors and consumers. As Jedlowski notes, many smaller producers are more or
less happy with the current state of affairs and prefer the flexibility of the informal
model. For these producers, ‘the local market is still large enough to make the business
worthwhile, and the quality of the products tends to be a secondary issue, with video
production designed very specifically for local audiences’.30 These bottom-end
producers favour high levels of production, low budgets and a customised/localised
mode of address (in the Nigerian context, this typically means making films for
religious communities and smaller geo-linguistic markets). For them, the informality
of the present distribution system, while certainly a source of revenue leakage, is not
necessarily a barrier to making money. The challenge is to get films to market quickly
and to make them as widely available as possible, before the pirates can catch up.
Hence we need to see the formalisation imperative as the prerogative of a certain sub-
set of producers, and not the industry as a whole.
It is also debatable whether audiences have much to gain from Nollywood
becoming more formal. Pirate infrastructures built the industry, and strong
competition among informal retailers keeps prices low and delivery fast. There is
always access to a diverse supply of movies, and if anything the last few years have
been characterised by overproduction – too many films rather than too few. From a
consumer perspective, the informal economy ensures easy access and low pricing, and
is therefore something to be protected rather than eradicated. However, informality
creates other kinds of problems for consumers. At present, one of the biggest gripes is
product quality. Audiences seem to be tiring of the quick and dirty Nollywood titles
and are eager for more professional features, which are hard to produce under
informal conditions. There are also many annoying aspects of the existing production
and distribution model – as when producers chop a single movie into two or three
instalments and sell them individually (as Blood for Tears Part 1 and Blood for Tears Part
2 [both 2007], for example). Hence, what is essentially one single movie effectively
costs double or triple what it should. These are the kinds of deceptive practices that
many in the industry want to stamp out.
There is also a deeper question lurking in the background of the current debates,
regarding the relationship between the informal economy and the state. Nollywood –
which as Okoye noted has produced so many ‘urban millionaires’ – has put little back
into the public purse. As an informal media economy, it exists outside the sphere of
taxation as well as regulation and measurement (see Chapter 3). Profits from the video
business have gone to individuals, rather than corporations or institutions. The
Nigerian state benefits only indirectly via levies on blank discs.31 Hence the video
pirates, and the industry in general, can potentially be accused of depriving their fellow
Nigerians of much-needed central revenues – for roads and hospitals, for film schools
and archives, for emergency relief and so on.
The issue of taxation takes on a particular significance in developing nations with
pressing infrastructural needs but limited capacity for revenue collection.
Formal–informal relations concern not only the efficiency of distribution systems but
also a more fundamentally political question – the role of the state in public life. While
Nollywood’s exuberant informality certainly reflects, and makes the best of, the
dysfunctional Nigerian economy, it also closes off the possibility of the video industry
playing a central part in national economic development. Nollywood is a ‘privatised’
form of media, the product of a commercial industry that has no interest in the state-
driven modernisation or the universalist public sphere of African independence
movements.32 The driving logic of Nollywood is personal enrichment, not social
change.
Of course, were the corrupt Nigerian government to receive tax earnings from
video producers and distributors, it could not be relied upon to redistribute these to its
population in productive ways. Some critics point out that the video industry in its
current informal state performs social services in a de facto manner – as when film
crews contribute something in return for permission from a traditional chief to shoot
in a particular village or neighbourhood (repairing a section of road, for instance).33

But for many African intellectuals committed to collectivist forms of political activism,
the rabid entrepreneurialism and consumerism stoked by the Nigerian video economy
is understandably disheartening. This underscores the fact that informal media
economies are very difficult to reconcile with existing paradigms of media and social
analysis. Resisting neat categorisation as virtues or vices, as sources of innovation or
exploitation, as relics of the past or talismans of the future, informal media economies
in general – and Nigerian video in particular – frustrate the desire for moral master
narratives.
FORMALISING INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION
Having examined the deep-rooted informality of the video industry and the current
campaign for formalisation, let us now consider how these dynamics play out in terms
of the international distribution of Nigerian videos. As noted earlier, Nollywood is a
business with global dreams. Intricate webs of trade and textual influence connect
Lagos and the various regional production centres with diasporic Africans in Europe,
the Middle East, North America and the Caribbean. For an aspirational industry like
this one, informality is both an asset and a liability.
Moradewun Adejunmobi offers a typology of the different modes of
transnationality shaping Nigerian video culture, which provides useful contextual
information for this discussion.34 First, Adejunmobi reminds us of the geographic
situation of African ethnic groups who found themselves divided by one or more
national border after the colonial powers’ carve-up of the continent in 1885. The
Yoruba people, for example, can be considered transnational as they reside in Nigeria,
Benin and Togo. The Hausa population is similarly spread across Nigeria, Niger, Sudan,
Cameroon, Ghana, the Ivory Coast and Chad. Second, there is the actual distribution of
movies throughout the African continent and throughout diasporic communities in
Europe and North America. Third, the movies themselves frequently exhibit a textual
kind of transnationalism, for an increasing number are now shot or at least set outside
Nigeria, from Benin (Àbe. ní [2006]) to the UK (Osuofia in London [2003]). To
Adejunmobi’s list we might also add the numerous promotional initiatives through
which the industry is seeking to position itself on the world stage, including the annual
Nollywood Foundation convention in Los Angeles and the Afro Hollywood Awards in
the UK, and the various forms of patronage it receives from its high-profile Hollywood
supporters, such as the actor Danny Glover.
I will focus on Adejunmobi’s second point, the distribution of Nigerian movies,
while also making reference to the other vectors of Nollywood’s transnationality, some
of which are co-constitutive. Nollywood has a very strong global presence throughout
Africa and in diasporic West African communities elsewhere – but what are the actual
channels of distribution? How do the movies reach dispersed, passionate audiences
around the world? As we will see, the international distribution network is almost
entirely informal, although the small amount of licit trade that exists is highly valued
by producers and marketers with their eyes on international expansion. Disc-based
distribution is still the lynchpin of Nollywood’s international circulation, although
satellite TV and online streaming are rapidly catching up.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes with pirated Nollywood DVDs, seized during raids in November 2010
(Image courtesy of Kings County District Attorney’s Office, New York)
Let’s begin with the disc circuits. Nollywood VCDs and DVDs are widely available
in Amsterdam, New York, London and other polyglot cities in Europe and North
America, where they are sold in diasporic grocery stores and video retailers. These
circuits are largely piratical, and enforcement efforts are sporadic at best.35 Foreign
copyright authorities have little incentive to protect the rights of overseas rights-
holders in the face of more direct pressure from their local counterparts, especially
the affiliates of the US studios and record labels. As a result, the rights of less
powerful cultural producers, especially those in the developing world, are rarely
enforced internationally.
There are signs that this situation may be changing as producers become more
astute about registering their work for copyright protection. Nigerian industry
representatives in the USA have been leading the charge, spearheaded by the
increasingly powerful Film-makers Association of Nigeria (FAN), a US-based
Nollywood lobby. Working with the local District Attorney’s office, FAN recently
orchestrated raids of pirate vendors of Nigerian movies in New York, resulting in the
seizure of 10,000 discs from nine stores in Brooklyn’s Flatbush area.36 FAN had reason
to be concerned: almost all the Nollywood trade in Flatbush was in bootlegs, with only
one store out of ten selling authorised DVDs. The pirate vendors were undercutting
the authorised vendor by a considerable margin: pirated discs sold for $3, compared to
$5 for legal copies.
While FAN’s campaign to enforce Nigerian producers’ rights in the USA is
understandable, perhaps commendable, it is not always clear what these initiatives
hope to achieve. Anti-piracy raids disperse pirate vending, or drive it underground,
rather than eradicate it. As Joe Karaganis argues, raids are a form of ‘selective
enforcement’ which ‘picks and chooses targets from the ocean of infringing activity’
and can easily become ‘arbitrary … theatrical, politicized, and a tool of competitive
advantage among businesses’ seeking to eliminate low-priced competition.37 Whether

this has any effect on the prevalence of DVD piracy among diasporic communities in
the USA remains to be seen.
In addition to international DVD and VCD circuits, Nigerian movies are also
appearing in increasing numbers on satellite TV networks. English-language
Nollywood movies, the most internationally mobile, can now be seen on two dedicated
twenty-four-hour channels hosted by the South Africa-based MNet – Africa Magic and
Africa Magic Plus. These channels have opened up Nigerian film culture to audiences
across Africa. Even though few African households can afford satellite TV
subscriptions, these channels permeate public spaces like restaurants and bars, vastly
increasing the reach of video culture. Specialist channels like Nollywood Movies (UK)
and the Africa Channel (USA and UK) offer a similar service for diasporic viewers.
Satellite TV broadcasting of Nigerian movies is a largely formal economy, with licence
fees paid to producers – although it is often alleged that fees are far too low to sustain
production. There are also rumours of widespread piracy by some of the smaller
regional broadcasters in Africa.
Overlaying the largely informal disc circuits and the largely formal satellite TV
circuits is an online distribution ecology. This has both formal and informal wings.
Legal video-on-demand services like Izogn Movies – a streaming site which offers
5,000 movies for online rental at $US0.99 to US$1.99 per film, facilitating around
38,000 movie purchases a month38 – coexist with pirate sites that stream the latest
films without authorisation. In these illicit sites, which make their money from display
ads, the objective is to maximise visitor traffic. This grey economy of online video (see
Chapter 6) includes dedicated Nollywood sites as well as more general African culture
portals, which feature video streaming alongside forums, chat, games, dating and
other attractions. The experience of watching a movie on one of these sites is quite
distinctive: imagine a small, pixellated image, surrounded by banner ads and
occasional pop-ups, with scrolling white text superimposed over the image, proudly
announcing the website’s URL, and often advertising other things like migration
advice and dating services.39 There is also a vast amount of free Nigerian video content
on YouTube, much of it uploaded by fans. Producers can have this content removed by
issuing a report of copyright infringement to YouTube, but this usually results in the
content being reposted elsewhere under a different username.
Nigerian producers with their sights set on international expansion face a
difficult task in monetising international streaming and disc circuits, which are so
thoroughly informal in nature. While there are many new distribution initiatives on
the horizon, it will be a long time before Nigerian videos surface on the shelves of
HMV, or in the catalogues of Netflix and Lovefilm. Mainstream retailers in the
affluent Euro-American markets are reluctant to deal with Nigerian producers
directly and require an association with established local or multinational companies,
and these links have yet to take shape. The legal international sales channels that do
exist are unreliable: they are slower than their pirate counterparts, and usually more
expensive. This state of affairs has led to much anxious commentary about the state
of the distribution system in Nigerian newspaper columns, industry forums, blogs
and message boards.
Rather than thinking exclusively about the informal nature of Nollywood’s global
circulation in terms of crisis and leakage, it is important to acknowledge the structural
advantages of informality. No formal system, however constituted, would be able to

rival piracy’s thorough permeation of the West African diaspora. While formal
distribution would certainly be more effective in getting Nigerian films into certain key
markets (such as film festivals and online retailers), the trade-off would be an increase
in price. Widespread international piracy may be the burden that Nollywood has to
bear for its massive popularity.
To complicate things further, there are those outside Nigeria who suggest that the
problem is not too little but too much distribution. Many film-makers and intellectuals
in other African countries, especially Anglophone nations like Ghana and Tanzania,
claim that Nollywood has decimated their indigenous video industries by ‘dumping’
large amounts of cheap product in local markets and by polluting their national
cultures with the crass individualism of the videos. Ghana has started imposing a levy
on visiting Nigerian actors and producers, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo
there have been moves to ban Nollywood films.40 Throughout Africa, critics and
intellectuals – many of whom come from the literary establishment – see in video
culture the intrusion of western vulgarity and individualism into the African cultural
space:
Among Africa’s elites, hostility is almost uniform … Cultural critics complain about ‘macabre
scenes full of sorcery’ in the films. The more alarmist describe Nigerian directors and
producers as voodoo priests casting malign spells over audiences in other countries. They talk
of the ‘Nigerianisation’ of Africa, worrying that the whole continent has come to ‘snap its
fingers the Nigerian way’ … Five decades after much of Africa gained independence, its elites
fear being re-colonised, this time from within the continent. ‘The Nigerians will eat
everything we have,’ says a former official at the Ghanaian ministry of chieftaincy and
culture.41
This critique of Nollywood’s influence abroad brings to mind the cultural imperialism
effect often attributed to Hollywood. In the above claims we can see an economic-
protectionist and a cultural-nationalist argument intertwining, and it is difficult to
draw a clear line between the two. This serves as a reminder that minor cinemas also
have their critics. To a young film-maker in Accra struggling to find funding for the
next production, Nigerian media may well be a more threatening and corrosive force
than US cinema.42 Nollywood, the scrappy underdog of global cinema, may also be its
next hegemon.
CONCLUSION
Nollywood emerges from these various debates as an industry which is simultaneously

too big and not big enough, a symbolic language which is excessively local and overly
westernised, an industry subject to too much and too little regulation. This diversity of
viewpoints is unsurprising, given how Nigerian video has permeated so many aspects
of everyday life in West Africa. Popularity inevitably brings controversy, and the
neverending debate about the future of the industry is proof of this. Such debates
represent an interesting twist in the remarkable Nollywood story.

The video industry is unique in that it has evolved from an economy based on
illegal duplication of foreign films to a legitimate, though largely informal, economy
trading in locally produced product. With its nontheatrical distribution model,
Nollywood is proof that informality can underwrite large-scale audiovisual cultures as
well as ephemeral circuits. At this stage, the future of the industry’s formalisation
imperative is uncertain, although it seems unlikely that increased regulation will
substantially alter the deep-seated informality of current distribution practice. It will
be fascinating to see what directions the industry goes in over the next decade, and
whether industry-wide reforms will be successful or whether they will create further
fragmentation and diversification in the distribution sector.
This chapter has examined in detail the mechanics of a largely informal film
industry, one built on pre-existing pirate circuits. The next chapter takes us away from
industry analysis and towards a discussion of media ethics, as we consider the politics
of copyright infringement in a transnational frame.
Pirate DVDs on sale at Tepito, Mexico City (Livia Radwanksi)

Lobato Ch5 9/1/12 3:54 pm Page 69
5
Six Faces of Piracy
In 1992, shortly after his epic film Malcolm X came out in cinemas, Spike Lee was
patrolling the streets of Harlem with a baseball bat. Lee was determined to keep his
movie out of the hands of the street vendors who sell pirate copies of new releases, so
the firebrand director called a few of his beefier associates – ‘muscle’, in Lee’s words –
and took matters into his own hands. Lee and his mates headed for 125th Street, then
a popular trading site for bootleggers, to chase vendors away under threat of force. For
Lee, this was a question of ethics: he expected that the black communities that
supported and enjoyed his film would, as a matter of principle, see it through the
proper channels. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with the African-American consumer in
some urban areas,’ he lamented. ‘They want to buy an inferior product and get
something for a bargain.’1
Though few film-makers adopt this hands-on enforcement model, most share Lee’s
frustration when it comes to piracy. It is understandable that a producer or director
investing years of work into a project wants to see a return on their investment.
Debate about the ‘copyright wars’ returns to this point frequently, focusing on
questions of revenue leakage and financial losses to cultural producers. The Motion
Picture Association is keen to remind us of the economic and social cost of piracy by
invoking dramatic statistics such as these:
• the major US studios lose $6.1 billion globally each year as a result of piracy,
• losses to audiovisual industries worldwide are estimated at $18.2 billion annually,
• millions of illegal discs and thousands of burners are seized in anti-piracy
operations each year,
• 80 per cent of global piracy originates from outside the USA, with especially high
levels of pirate audiovisual consumption occurring in China (90 per cent), Russia
(79 per cent) and Thailand (79 per cent),
• piracy operations have links to terrorist outfits, prostitution rings, drug smugglers
and organised crime syndicates.2
For the MPAA, piracy is defined as ‘the unauthorized copying, distribution,

performance or other use of copyrighted materials’.3 Other industry bodies, such as
the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia, define piracy even more
broadly, as ‘any form of revenue leakage from any point in the value chain’4 – a
phrase which highlights how piracy often becomes a scapegoat for the industry’s
Six Faces of Piracy 69

structural problems. In the context of the so-called copyright wars, the ‘pirate’ label is
now a discursive weapon to be deployed against a wide range of perceived enemies.
The term is strategically used to define distribution activities occurring outside the
sphere of rights-holder revenue-generation as deviant and exceptional. But as we
have seen throughout this book, film piracy is as old as cinema itself and needs to be
understood as an inherent feature of audiovisual distribution rather than an
aberration.
In previous chapters we encountered a wide array of informal circuits, from bootleg
video rings to file-sharing networks (Chapter 3). We examined the role pirate networks
play within legitimate film industries and saw evidence of their productive capacities
(Chapter 4). My aim throughout has been to take some of the heat out of the piracy
debate by looking at how a diverse range of networks function, steering clear of
‘copyright wars’ rhetoric in favour of a materialist approach. Now, having seen how
diverse pirate circuits work in practice, we can consider some of the thorny ethical and
philosophical questions around unauthorised copying.
In this chapter I argue that piracy debates need to be opened up to a more diverse
range of voices, both in terms of their implicit geography and their conceptual
foundations. In most nations, and especially in the USA, the discussion about media
piracy is heavily polarised. The debate is not really a debate at all but a repetitive
performance of partisan posturing, with two viewpoints dominating above all others:
an industry-driven anti-piracy/pro-copyright line pitched against an equally shrill anti-
copyright/pro-piracy defence by consumer advocates and libertarians. This head-
butting does not do justice to the complexity of the matters before us. It is reductive,
idealistic and implicitly ethnocentric, in ways I will explain shortly.
Instead of thinking of piracy as a singular practice, it is necessary to think in terms
of piracies. Depending on the context, piracy may be theft or a legitimate business
practice, a free speech act or a form of political resistance. Sometimes it is all these
things at once. The discussion that follows seeks to untangle some of these threads by
surveying six different ethical and philosophical positions on copyright infringement –
what I call the six faces of piracy. This is not an exhaustive account of all possible
positions but a way to open up the conversation to a broader range of viewpoints. In
the final section of the chapter, I bring some of these threads together with a case
study of a pirate DVD vendor at the Tepito market in Mexico City, foregrounding how
pirate circuits can also be networks for film preservation and archiving, and how the
lines between formality and informality are often very blurry indeed.
COPYRIGHT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF PIRACY
The intellectual property (IP) system – encompassing copyright, patent and trademark
law and regulation – is promoted by media industries as a common-sense way of
protecting the rights of cultural producers, rewarding them for their efforts and
fostering future innovation. But intellectual property is itself a historically and
culturally specific idea, not a moral absolute. The philosophical foundation of
copyright – the concept of private property as an organising principle of society and
the economy – can be found in the shift from feudal to early modern social structures

in Europe. Intellectual property may be an integral part of capitalist thought and

practice, but it is neither universal nor historically constant.
The history of copyright has been the subject of countless studies.5 While
precedents for copyright can be found in ancient Greece, Italy and the Netherlands,
most scholars trace the origins of modern copyright to early eighteenth-century
England, and specifically to the passing of the Statute of Anne in 1710. Named
after the reigning monarch, this statute provided authors and publishers with the
first enforceable period of monopoly control over their work – a period of fourteen
years, extendable once only, after which a work would enter into the public domain.
This was considered to be a fair trade-off between the competing demands of
individual authors and society at large, which was presumed to benefit from a freely
accessible archive of cultural production. This way of thinking about the role of
copyright – as a compromise between producers and consumers – is fundamental to
legal doctrine, entrenching the idea that the interests of these two camps are
opposed. From this perspective, it is the job of law to ‘balance’ competing needs
and desires.
The globalisation of copyright law has gathered pace since the late nineteenth
century. In 1886, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic
Works was signed by a number of European nations, and would go on to become the
key template for global copyright in the twentieth century.6 The USA passed its own
International Copyright Act in 1891, which extended protection to foreign authors for
the first time. This internationalisation was consolidated and extended with the 1948
Brussels Convention (which granted copyright protection to cinema) and the 1994
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which
formed part of the final Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT). The GATT’s successor, the World Trade Organisation, is a key driver of what
John Frow calls the ‘new world order in knowledge’.7
A few key points can be drawn from this brief account. First, copyright works to
convert knowledge into capital, yet its reach extends beyond the realm of the economic
and into the symbolic: it designates forms of cultural production as legitimate or
illegitimate based on a set of values which privilege originality and innovation. In
contrast, the public domain is always defined negatively, as that which is ‘left over
after all other rights have been defined and distributed’.8
Second, copyright terms have increased steadily over time, meaning that
cultural production is kept out of the public domain for longer periods. Copyright
terms now extend up to seventy years after the death of the creator in many
territories. Term extensions have been a key feature of recent US trade pacts, such
as the Free Trade Agreements signed with Australia and South Korea. Wherever IP
industries have political clout, constant pressure for further extensions exists. In
2011 the Council of the European Union extended the term of copyright protection
for sound recordings from fifty to seventy years, just in time to stop multi-
platinum albums by the Rolling Stones and The Who from falling into the public
domain. The debates currently raging about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement, a controversial plurilateral treaty which promises to significantly
increase enforcement obligations in signatory nations, provide a taste of the IP
maximalism to come.9

Third, ‘art’ and ‘business’ are not always diametrically opposed forces in IP debates.
The history of copyright contains many examples of artists who have been more
interested in the extension of moral and property rights than in the future of the
public domain. Wordsworth, Twain and Dickens were all champions of copyright, as
are Metallica and George Lucas today.10 We should also note that copyright law has on
some occasions also been used as a tool to protect the rights of individual artists
against corporate interests. For example, the moral rights (droit d’auteur) provision of
European copyright law was the basis for John Huston’s court victory over MGM in
relation to the colourisation of the 1950 film The Asphalt Jungle.11 Hence it is not
always easy to separate the interests of individual producers, media corporations,
cultural industry sectors and the public within these IP skirmishes.
Given the high visibility of today’s digital copyright debate, which is marked by
suspicion and misunderstanding on both sides, there is a need to acknowledge that
ideas about copyright and its infringement are historically contingent, and are
therefore subject to change and contestation. Understanding the historical and spatial
variability of ‘piracy’ is the key to a more complex and productive debate. This means
approaching piracy not as something to be attacked or defended but as an integral part
of the global political economy of media, with diverse manifestations and effects.
Piracy must be defined in the plural. With this aim in mind, the next section offers a
critical reading of six different philosophical positions on copyright infringement:
piracy as theft, free enterprise, free speech, authorship, resistance and access.
PIRACY AS THEFT
Let’s begin with the most common understanding of piracy, one enshrined in legal
doctrine and industry practice. As indicated above, the purpose of copyright as a
regulatory system is to ensure that levels of protection for IP rights-holders are on a
par with those extended to other property owners, such as land owners or car owners.
From this perspective, copyright is seen as something to be legislatively consolidated
and pedagogically entrenched. Piracy, on the other hand, is imagined as an act of social
and economic deviance – that is, as theft.
In the world of film, this approach to piracy is best exemplified by the actions of
the Motion Picture Association of America and its international wing, the Motion
Picture Association. No one has been more vocal in the denunciations of piracy nor
more florid in their rhetoric than former MPAA president Jack Valenti. A former aide
to Lyndon Johnson, this powerful lobbyist ran the MPAA from 1966 until 2004. He
contributed significantly to several landmark legal offensives, including the failed
1984 Sony Corp vs Universal City Studios case (the ‘Betamax case’), which sought to
stamp out the booming home video industry, and the much-maligned Digital
Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which introduced controversial ‘anti-
circumvention’ restrictions. Now deceased, Valenti was a legendary orator. During
Congressional hearings for the Betamax case, he famously quipped that ‘the VCR is to
the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the
woman home alone’. He regularly referred to piracy as ‘a pandemic’ which robs IP
industries of what is rightfully theirs, and was also fond of making unsubstantiated

connections between piracy operations and terrorist groups including Hezbollah,

Hamas, the IRA, Al Qaeda and Lashka-e-Toiba.12
The MPAA’s war on piracy strives to embed an ethics of copyright in the global
mindset. MPAA ad campaigns attempt to counter the belief that piracy is a
victimless crime by featuring Hollywood technicians and tradespeople lamenting the
threat that piracy poses to their livelihoods.13 MPAA competitions such as the
‘Xcellent Xtreme Challenge’ offer DVDs and Hollywood studio trips to children who
submit anti-piracy essays. The organisation’s website even promotes a ‘Copyright
Kids’ game (www.copyrightkids.org) where children can familiarise themselves with
the virtues of IP by registering their own poems, paintings and drawings for
protection.14
While the USA has been the key driver of international IP maximalism, anti-piracy
campaigning and enforcement is a feature of many national media industries. Hong
Kong’s film community famously came out in force against disc piracy on a national
day of action in March 1999, when cinemas shut their doors and stars including Jackie
Chan, Steven Chow, Leon Lai and Anita Mui led a protest march to the Hong Kong
Central Government Offices. In Australia, anti-piracy ad campaigns draw a link
between disc piracy and the dismal state of the Australian film industry, imploring the
consumer to ‘think about what you’re really burning’. Key players in the Indian film
industry are now hiring ‘cyber hitmen’ to take down pirate movie websites by crashing
their servers with DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks.15 And as we saw in the
previous chapter, copyright enforcement is now the number one priority for many
Nigerian film-makers. These various examples illustrate the importance of IP
enforcement for film industries in all nations. Like IP law itself, anti-piracy
campaigning is increasingly a global phenomenon.
Industry estimates of losses due to piracy, used widely in these campaigns, are
controversial. For many years, these figures were based on calculations which
presumed that for each movie accessed illegally, a legitimate version of the same film
went unsold. This logic is dubious as it ignores the influence of pricing levels and
distributive contingencies in media consumption. Furthermore, reports of industry
losses are usually based on gross rather than net figures, and are necessarily suspect
given that piracy’s subterranean and disreputable nature means attempts to quantify
it are inevitably speculative.16 Methodologies have improved in recent years,17 but
industry data collection is inevitably driven by a public relations imperative. As Majid
Yar notes, delineating the empirical contours of the piracy ‘epidemic’ has as much to
do with increasing amounts of everyday activity being criminalised as it does with
verifiable increases in unauthorised distribution:
high figures put pressure on legislators to criminalize, and on enforcement agencies to police
more rigorously; the tightening of copyright laws produces more ‘copyright theft’ as previously
legal or tolerated uses are prohibited, and the more intensive policing of ‘piracy’ results in
more seizures; these in turn produce new estimates suggesting that the ‘epidemic’ continues
to grow unabated; which then legitimates industry calls for even more vigorous action.18
So, while film producers and studios do have legitimate concerns about revenue
‘leakage’, the war on piracy also needs to be understood as a public relations exercise

aimed at reinforcing a deferential relationship to copyright and showing the vulnerable

side of a powerful industry. Having discussed some of the features of anti-piracy
discourse, I now offer another reading of piracy, one which sees copying not as a
scourge but as a potential business model.
PIRACY AS FREE ENTERPRISE
While several of the approaches to piracy discussed here involve an implicit critique
of the free market, one does not. This perspective – what we might call the laissez-
faire approach – reads piracy as the purest form of free enterprise. Unimpeded by
restrictive legislation and monopolistic market structures, piracy from this vantage
point can be appreciated as a flourishing of commercial activity catering directly to
market needs.
As Ronald Bettig notes, there is a longstanding economic argument that greater
efficiency can be achieved in a liberalised regulatory environment where the reduction
in returns to copyright holders would be offset by productivity gains arising from
lower prices and wider availability of cultural goods.19 This argument for ‘weak
copyright’ is a recurrent feature of regulation debates. Even The Economist has
suggested that copyright terms should be stripped back to fourteen or twenty-eight
years.20 In other words, an argument can be made on economic grounds alone that
strong copyright is undesirable. If we push this argument to its logical limit, it becomes
possible to read piracy as the quintessential form of free enterprise.
This view suggests that the two competing objectives which copyright seeks to
balance – collective progress and individual profit – can be folded into one another.
This way of thinking about piracy foregrounds some of its economically generative
dimensions. It highlights that box-office revenue is not the only way film consumption
can create economic value, and emphasises that piracy is ultimately a mode of
consumption which can be monetised in numerous ways (one example is product
placement in movies, where brand value is increased with unauthorised circulation). It
also breeds demand for cinema in demographics that may one day ripen into viable
formal markets. From this laissez-faire perspective, copyright protects one kind of
economic activity but, in doing so, stifles the possibility of other, perhaps more
creative, revenue-generating arrangements.
The historian Adrian Johns argues that the idea of piracy as ‘a business force’ has
long been a driver of anti-IP movements, up to and including those of today’s open-
source movement.21 Johns notes that many of the economists and public intellectuals
associated with a critique of copyright – including Ronald Coase and Oliver Smedley –
were motivated not by anti-establishment sentiment or a commitment to
redistributive justice but by a combination of free-enterprise orthodoxy, a
philosophical commitment to individualism, distrust of state regulation and loathing
of the BBC ‘monopoly’. This argument was most powerfully articulated by the Institute
for Economic Affairs in a 1965 pamphlet on radio regulation in the UK, which featured
a section entitled ‘Piracy as a Business Force’. According to Johns, these figures ‘made
the public-monopoly broadcasting system into a lynchpin of their arguments against
Keynesian orthodoxy’.22 These anti-copyright debates were taking place at the same

time as the pirate radio ships moored off the coast of England were beginning their
illegal broadcasts, and Johns argues that the two events were ideologically connected.
(One of the ships was called the Laissez-Faire.) This alternative history of pirate
philosophy – which connects pirate radio culture to what would become Thatcherite
free-market ideology – offers compelling evidence of the link between piracy and
economic liberalism in the UK.
A different though parallel relation between the free market and pirate practice
can be found in present-day China, the source of many of the bootleg DVDs sold
around the world. The PRC’s thriving pirate economy is often painted as the Mr
Hyde to formal capitalism’s Dr Jekyll, but this only reveals part of the story. Here,
the lines between formal and informal business are often blurred, with DVD
factories producing legal copies during the daytime and pirate copies of the same
film during the evening.23 This grey economy is a side-effect of the boom in legal
enterprise that has followed China’s accession to the WTO, as piracy is dependent on
factors such as increased consumer activity, availability of digital technology and
new levels of commercial autonomy for Chinese businesses. Illustrating the overlap
between the formal and the informal, Warner Bros.’ subsidiary in the PRC even
chose as its first home video licensee a well-known piracy outfit, the Xianke
company.24
As this suggests, in China the economic dynamics of pirate activity are more
complex than the mere production of bootleg DVDs. Weak Chinese enforcement of
western IP creates profit opportunities right along the media supply chain, and there
will always be a business ready to take these up. Many cheaply produced DVD players
are not equipped with the anti-copying mechanisms that make life difficult for
consumers – region coding, Macrovision, copy protection – because the manufacturers
of these units are not part of vertically integrated audiovisual conglomerates and have
little to gain from the extra costs incurred through building copy-prevention
technology into their players.25 This kind of IP-weak environment is piratical, yes, but
it can also be read as a more pure kind of free market. In comparison to an
oligopolistic, vertically integrated, top-heavy capitalism which perpetuates itself
through technical standards and IP regulation, this ‘cockroach capitalism’ is speedy,
nimble and furtive.26
Over the years the Japanese electronics giant Sony Corporation has evolved from
cockroach to insect-killer, reflecting an evolving relationship to the formal. At the time
of the Betamax case, Sony was a hardware manufacturer on the receiving end of the
MPAA’s anti-home video offensive. It was portrayed by the studios as a rogue company
trying to erode copyright protection and destabilise the industry. Two decades later,
Sony is now in the opposite position. Since its purchase of Columbia Pictures, it has
become a Hollywood giant which takes a very hard line on piracy. One attempt to
shore up IP protection in the face of endemic copying involved embedding spyware
and data-collection programs into the CDs of Sony-BMG artists, a strategy which
became a public relations disaster.27
The manufacture of cheap hardware that thumbs its nose at the technical
standards of Big Hollywood is close to a pure version of cockroach capitalism, but
piracy is its epitome. In the laissez-faire imaginary, piracy fills gaps in the market with
maximum efficiency, catering to demand when and where legitimate industries are

unwilling or unable to do so. Consider the following quote from Bob Vallone, General
Manager of Hong Kong chain UA Cinemas:
The pirates have become so wealthy they have superior manufacturing equipment lines over
legitimate manufacturers and licensees. Their network of distribution is to be envied. They
can get movies and music CDs onto the streets of Asia virtually overnight.28
Here we have a reading of the pirate which begrudgingly admires his/her speed,
flexibility and technological savvy – all the qualities of the network society’s idealised
citizen. While the industry position views piracy as a mortal threat to film trade, a
laissez-faire reading sees the informal networks that constitute piracy operations as the
ultimate ‘new economy’ and as a potential model for other distribution circuits. And as
we shall now see, piracy can also be a hot-button political issue.
PIRACY AS FREE SPEECH
Arguably the most effective critiques of current copyright law have come from a group
of vocal, tech-savvy American liberals. Affiliated with the ‘free culture’ movement and
such bastions of techno-libertarianism as Wired29 magazine and the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, commentators like Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow are
attempting to make copyright reform a mainstream political issue. They argue that
copyright’s intended balance between the public interest (which requires that people
can easily access and use information) and the free market (requiring frameworks to
protect property rights and provide secure incentives for innovation) is increasingly
favouring the latter over the former. These writers – and many others – feel that the
piracy issue is inextricably linked to the right of free expression.
The sympathies of Lessig and his contemporaries lie with consumers and
creatives. They are concerned, on the one hand, with the harsh penalties that peer-to-
peer downloading attracts, with our inability to legally transfer data between
different pieces of hardware, with the bugs and spyware that jam up our computers.
At the same time, they seek a way through the copyright minefield for directors,
writers, musicians, DJs, animators and software developers, via legal recognition of
appropriative cut’n’paste techniques as legitimate forms of expression. In his book
Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses the history of copyright as
it relates to literature, film, music and software, arguing that the current hard-
lockdown phase of IP regulation is stifling creativity. He proposes a system of ‘thin
protection’ as the best way to ensure the fair compensation of creatives while still
fostering a culture of innovation and freedom of information.30 Michael Strangelove
takes a more anarchic approach in his study The Empire of Mind, lamenting the
internet’s transformation from a space of culture-jamming and activism into a
marketplace ruled by IP autocrats.31 For Strangelove, piracy is a progressive act
designed to take back what should rightfully belong to everyone – the liberating
potential of digital technology. This kind of popular copyright critique is reminiscent
of the hacker ethos of the free software movement32 and an older generation of
culture-jamming activism.

Lessig, a former Young Republican and now Stanford law professor, is the most
powerful figure in this movement and the driving force behind Creative Commons, an
easy-to-use alternative to copyright licensing. Creative Commons operates on a ‘some
rights reserved’ principle: artists who license a work this way can still benefit
financially from its use, but they may also give permission for the work to be used
creatively by others (as samples, as source code and so on) or for non-profit purposes.
Lessig’s influential books The Future of Ideas, Free Culture and Remix have become
bibles for the copyright reform movement.33 Free Culture has even spawned its own
student movement, which is increasingly visible on US college campuses.
Lessig’s brand of copyright activism is grounded in the liberal values of
informational freedom and personal liberty. He argues that forms of appropriative
cultural production are under threat from the ‘copyright warriors’ whose restrictive IP
laws are harming free enterprise and suppressing the creativity of users. The solution
is a weakening – not a wholesale dismantling – of IP law. In Lessig’s words,
‘Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over
the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that
digital technology enables.’34
Like the laissez-faire crowd referred to earlier, Lessig sees excessive regulation as a
threat. This is a similar sentiment to that espoused in other recent high-profile
interventions in IP and innovation debates, such as Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of
the Internet (and How to Stop It) and Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks.35 The
liberal copyright critique advanced by these critics is a reformist position which seeks a
taming of IP maximalism rather than the wholesale overthrow of the political and
economic systems of which it is a part.
Lessig, like most copyright liberals, insists that his ‘message is absolutely not
antimarket’.36 While noting that piracy has long been a constitutive feature of the
content industries, he constantly declares his opposition to ‘theft’, drawing a line in
the sand between acceptable piracy (cut’n’paste cultural production, culture jamming,
remix culture) and stealing. But as Kavita Philip correctly notes, this argument is
somewhat ethnocentric, given that the ‘creative’ pirates defended by Lessig are
typically white and middle-class while ‘uncreative’ mass reproduction is associated
with the developing world.37 Consider the following quote from Lessig, which makes a
quintessentially liberal connection between property rights and freedom:
A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don’t get
paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can’t get paid, is anarchy, not freedom
… Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and
control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. But just as a free market is
perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in
the property rights that define it.38
The careless use of the word ‘queered’ here should alert us to some of the exclusions
that underwrite Lessig’s distinction between appropriation and theft, and which also
animate the arguments of his colleagues. This is a point to which we will return
shortly. In the meantime, let’s consider another reading of piracy, this time from a
poststructuralist perspective.

PIRACY AS AUTHORSHIP
While the arguments profiled so far concern issues of access, economy and politics,
cultural theorists and philosophers have critiqued intellectual property by dismantling
one of its foundational concepts: authorship. By approaching the author as a textual
effect rather than a sovereign expressive agent, poststructuralist thinkers including
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have sought to dismantle
commonsensical ideas about originality, innovation and expression. From this
perspective, all authorship involves piracy. If we take these ideas in a slightly different
direction, we end up with an equally compelling question: is piracy a form of
authorship?
The postmodern critique of the author draws attention to the historical specificity
of our intellectual property system and how it formalises a particular concept of
invention and creativity. What passes for originality or appropriation, as opposed to
theft or forgery, is in most cases a by-product of IP law rather than universal standards
of creative conduct. If we accept that the structural basis of intellectual property is
culturally specific, then the logical next step is to ask how ideas about property,
authorship and originality are propagated and sustained – and how we might go about
changing them. Poststructuralist and postmodern theories provide some conceptual
tools which we can use to scrutinise these processes.
A famous attack on conventional notions of authorship comes via Roland Barthes’s
essay ‘The Death of the Author’. Arguing that ‘it is language which speaks, not the
author’, Barthes seeks to cut the text loose from the discursive anchors provided by
what we understand as authorship.39 By ‘death’, he refers not only to the redundancy
of the author as a critical category but also to a kind of transformation that occurs
during the act of writing: ‘the author enters into his own death, writing begins’.40 Most
importantly for our purposes, Barthes sees the act of creation not as the labour of a
unified expressive soul but as the selection and combination of fragments of already-
existing discourse:
a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the
Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture … the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never
original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way
as to never rest on any of them.41
This model of authorship presents a problem for the notions of originality and
innovation which underwrite IP law. If originality is now impossible and the role of the
artist or writer is simply to rearrange existing discourse in new combinations, what
makes a pirate different from an artist? Only the fact that they rest too long on one
particular site, resisting copyright’s call to move along in a timely fashion.
The work of Derrida offers a more explicit critique of copyright law. His well-
known essay ‘Limited Inc a b c’ – originally written as a response to the philosopher
John Searle, who had earlier published a scathing critique of Derrida – delights in
mocking his opponent along with the principles and practices of copyright. The

purported authorship of Searle (to whom he slyly refers as Sarl; SA in French stands
for société anonyme, and denotes a publicly limited company) is sent up in the opening
paragraphs, in which Derrida suggests that his opponent’s claim to copyright is
fraudulent given that their correspondence is dialogic in nature, the two writers have
colleagues in common, and that Searle acknowledges a family member in a footnote:
If John R. Searle owes a debt to D. Searle concerning this discussion, then the ‘true’ copyright
ought to belong … to a Searle who is divided, multiplied, conjugated, shared. What a
complicated signature! And one that becomes even more complex when the debt includes my
old friend, H. Dreyfus, with whom I myself have worked, discussed, exchanged ideas, so that if
it is indeed through him that the Searles have ‘read’ me, ‘understood’ me, and ‘replied’ to me,
then I, too, can claim a stake in the ‘action’ or ‘obligation,’ the stocks and bonds, of this
holding company, the Copyright Trust.42
Derrida’s point is that every act of creation is indebted to what has gone before it, and
that all this sits precariously on the shifting sands of language, a system of arbitrary
webs of signification. If the materials with which the artist is working are not their
own, how can one claim to be the sole creator – much less the owner – of a particular
text? The same spirit animates the opening to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari’s
A Thousand Plateaus, in which the authors jibe that ‘Since each of us was several, there
was already a crowd.’43
This line of argument suggests that the creation of a text is in some way a process
of selecting from what has gone before. To be an author, then, involves the
recombination of these elements into a coherent whole. The logical conclusion is that
authorship and creativity are piratical. Does it also hold that piracy is creative, or a
form of authorship? This depends on the context. As we will see in the case study at
the end of this chapter, many forms of commercial disc piracy involve substantial
modification and ‘enhancement’ of content which could be understood as forms of
creativity. The piracy-as-authorship argument does important work in destabilising
the concepts of creative ownership and moral rights to control of a work, and the
logical extension of this argument is indeed to see piracy as authorship.
Returning now to film studies, we can identify many potential sites where these
propositions about authorship come into conflict with the discursive structures that
regulate film culture. One example is genre. Key genre theorists such as Steve Neale
have defined genre as an agreed pact between producer and audience, and in so doing
have sought to qualify the once-dominant auteur theory with a more sophisticated
model of formal evolution, one which acknowledges the cultural labour of audiences.44
The tension between the auteur model of film analysis and the genre model therefore
requires us to rethink both the role and value of the author. Any text, whether it
conforms to or confounds the norms of established genres, relies on our familiarity
with at least some of the texts and styles it does or does not invoke. Without this, it
would be meaningless – and unprofitable. Genre films illustrate particularly clearly the
ways that conventional narrative structure, formal elements and characters convey
indexed meanings, so that audience labour (prior filmgoing experience) is converted
into cultural capital. ‘Innovation’ lies in the selection and combination of pre-existing
elements. All films function in this way, including those that claim to break every rule

of narrative cinema while still conforming to the well-established meta-genres of the

art film, the experimental film and so on. Genre theory teaches us that cinema is a hall
of mirrors, with each new text reflecting its constituent parts. From this perspective, it
is difficult to see how a copyright system which attributes authorship to one entity
alone can equitably redistribute revenues. The law is a blunt instrument for these
delicate problems.45
Today’s piracy debate relocates these discussions about originality and authorship
in cultural production to the sphere of distribution. If genre theory suggests that
traditional ‘auteurist’ claims to authorship have as much or as little moral weight as
other modes of cultural production, does this also weaken the implication that only
one kind of creativity gives the moral right to control how a work is distributed?
Destabilising authorship necessarily calls into question our assumptions, formalised in
IP law, about the role that originality plays in determining who controls access to the
work. The question remains the same: what moral claim can be legitimately exercised
over the distribution of cultural products created in complex socio-symbolic contexts
where the origins of a concept, phrase, image or riff are multi-dimensional and inter-
related?
Having briefly sampled the poststructuralist critique of authorship, and considered
its implications for piracy debates, let us now turn to Marxist critique for a different
take on the issue.
PIRACY AS RESISTANCE
While film industry lobbyists decry piracy, postmodernists read it as an intrinsic

component of authorship and cyber-libertarians see it as a business model, Marxist
critics have interpreted piracy as a form of subversion. Scholars in the critical political
economy tradition foreground issues of power and resistance within the media
industries. They draw our attention to the ‘expansionary logic’ of capital and to issues
of ownership, regulation and control.46 As well as being texts, films are understood as
‘commodities whose value is derived from the labour that makes them’.47 From this
perspective, copyright is a hegemonic legal institution which converts information and
labour into capital. As copyright’s maligned Other, the act of piracy takes on a certain
political value.
Unlike Lessig, these critics are decidedly antimarket; they view the media as an
architecture of control and exploitation which operates in the service of capitalism.
They insist on the importance of class as an explanatory category. Ronald V. Bettig, in
his authoritative book Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual
Property, argues that copyright represents a strategy of property regulation and market
colonisation operating in the service of the international bourgeoisie. Bettig provides a
detailed history of copyright law, highlighting the ‘essential connection between the
rise of capitalism, the extension of commodity relations into literary and artistic
domains, and the emergence of the printing press’.48 He notes how the US
government, in close consultation with the MPAA, has spread copyright culture
globally through trade sanctions against recalcitrant nations, FTAs with built-in IP
boosters, multilateral initiatives such as GATT and the WTO, and increased

infringement penalties and enforcement efforts. Bettig’s reading of the home video
turf wars, of which the Betamax case was the most spectacular moment, draws the
following conclusion:
The ultimate goal has been to raise the effectiveness and comprehensiveness of the
international intellectual property system in order to create or extend markets exploitable not
only for US home-video distributors but for other communications and mass media
transnationals as well.49
For Bettig, pirate circuits are spheres of commercial activity which have yet to be
(re)colonised by transnational audiovisual empires. The conversion of pirate markets
into legitimate markets effectively means handing them over Hollywood. The
argument here is that piracy, in its obstruction of capitalist domination, represents a
form of resistance.
In addition to exploring issues of control and ownership, Toby Miller and his co-
authors open up a new direction for class analysis in media studies by exploring the
political economy of film labour. Their book Global Hollywood is concerned not only
with media owners but also with the ‘below-the-line’ workers who paint the sets and
drive the delivery vans. They argue that intellectual property law is one of the key
enablers of the major studios’ exploitative practices: ‘IP’s transformation of knowledge
into property traditionally prioritises ownership over use, creators over audiences and
production over reception’.50 Global Hollywood lists countless examples of heavy-
handed IP enforcement, such as Disney’s lawsuit against a Florida school over the
copyrighted cartoon characters painted on its buildings. It offers a sophisticated
theorisation of piracy which revolves around a question that is also central to this book
– whether piracy should be taken seriously as a form of film distribution. While noting
that pirate operations frequently involve exploitation of various kinds and may
interface with state and corporate networks in myriad ways, they approvingly invoke
Michel de Certeau’s model of the tactical in their discussion of ‘mobile, small-scale
pirate networks that cater to local populations rooted in the practices of
“transformative appropriation” ’.51 Here, as in the work of Bettig, piracy is implicitly
valorised for its challenge to the Hollywood status quo.
The Hong Kong-based media critic Laikwan Pang takes this argument further. In
polemical style, Pang mounts a reading of pirate media ‘as a critical interrogation of
today’s international cultural politics’.52 Through a textual and industrial analysis of
Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003/4), she argues that Hollywood has freely pilfered textual
content from Asian cinemas while simultaneously waging rhetorical war against
copyright infringement. For Pang, the difference between the two forms of piracy is
legality, which is of course defined according to structures that favour Hollywood.
Pang’s work mounts a compelling challenge to dominant copyright discourse – but it
also tends at times to construct a binary opposition between a pillaging West and a
cowering Rest, with ‘Asia’ presented as the passive victim of cultural imperialism.53
This is a common feature of what we might call ‘anti-anti-piracy’ arguments, which
are framed against a backdrop of Hollywood over-enforcement. The question is
differently inflected when we consider the effect of commercial piracy on non-US
cinemas. Pang’s focus in much of her work is on China’s position in the copyright wars,

and the last chapter of her book Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia addresses the
difficult issue of piracy’s negative impact on film production in Hong Kong and the
PRC. This presents some unresolved questions about the limits of piracy-as-resistance
discourse. Can piracy of non-western cinemas be as easily excused under this rubric as
the piracy of Paramount blockbusters? By extension, is the piracy-as-resistance
argument, usually framed in response to Hollywood domination, unwittingly US-
centric? This brings us to a final reading of piracy, one which tackles the geopolitics of
IP head-on.
PIRACY AS ACCESS
Recent work from postcolonial and critical legal studies offers a different reading of
piracy, one less concerned with its ethics than with its potential. This approach is
interested in the transformative aspects of piracy, in piracy’s capacity to disseminate
culture, knowledge and capital. It interrogates the relationship between technology
and development, asking not ‘Whose property?’ but ‘Whose future?’.
A familiar cast of characters populate piracy debates in the first world: the teenage
file-sharer, the struggling film-maker, the media multinational, the pirate-terrorist
syndicate and so on. Missing from this scenario are forms of everyday piracy which
take place in contexts where accessing media legally is not an option. Many
communities in the developing world are not included in the Marxist critiques outlined
above because they may not belong to a working class per se, much less the creative
class to whom liberal copyright reformers address their arguments. For billions of
people around the world, piracy is an access route to media that is not otherwise
available. This kind of piracy is not usually a self-consciously political act but a banal,
quotidian activity practised in a context where legal alternatives do not exist.
This mode of everyday media piracy is common in South East Asian mediascapes.
A 2006 article from The Bangkok Post features interviews with pirate consumers, who
explain their reasons for violating IP law:
Recently, self-confessed cinephile Saner Lohvithi bought a pirated DVD of Rainer

Fassbinder’s In the Year with 13 Moons from a shop at Chatuchak Weekend Market. On
another recent evening when he was downtown, he dropped by at a sidewalk stall on Silom
to purchase bootlegged discs of Saraband, Ingmar Bergman’s new movie, Princess Raccoon,
Seijun Suzuki’s cult musical, and Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 classic Aleksandr Nevskiy. ‘I know
it’s illegal, I know about intellectual property,’ says the 33-year-old. ‘But I’m not buying
pirated King Kong or The Lord of the Rings. I’m only buying the movies that, if I do not resort
to pirated DVDs, I won’t have any chance of seeing. But since I really want to see them, I do
not have any choice, do I?’ …
A number of cinephiles in Thailand share Saner’s opinion: without piracy, they wouldn’t
have any chance to watch daring, unusual, non-Hollywood movies from around the globe.
Thai theatres wouldn’t dream of showing, say Princess Raccoon, a madcap musical by the
maverick Japanese director, or the Expressionist classic Dr Mabuse, and a legal copy of each
bought over the Internet will cost over 1,500 baht (each ‘ghost’ copy costs around 100 to 150
baht).54

The article makes the important point that Thai DVD piracy operations provide their
own subtitles for discs, as many imported official versions, especially arthouse films,
do not contain Thai subtitles. This has led to pirate versions of international films
being shown in film courses at Thai universities.55 The article concludes by suggesting
that the pirate economy may have done more to stimulate ‘highbrow film culture’ than
the 2006 Bangkok International Film Festival, which did not subtitle its films for local
audiences.
This raises a question about the role of pirate distribution within international film
flows. While DVD pirates may be helping to foster a nascent cinephile film culture in
Thailand, this is a culture modelled along Euro-American, and to some extent
Japanese, lines. Pirates tend not to touch Thai films because official copies are
reasonably priced and the profit margins are slimmer. As a result, a hegemonic
‘international arthouse’ film appreciation is reproduced through piracy, and so are the
omissions that structure the film festival circuit.56 Compare this to the informal
Nigerian video circuits discussed in the previous chapter which offer a different kind of
access: a piracy which does not hook peripheral viewers into an international canon
but provides a material ‘infrastructure’ for the production and circulation of an
indigenous visual culture.57 The difference between these two examples relates to
specific instantiations of pirate circuits rather than inherent properties of piracy itself.
Piracy is oblivious to content and will make available whatever the market demands.
The Delhi-based critic Ravi Sundaram has brought rich experiential detail to
debates about informal circuits. In a series of absorbing essays and in his book Pirate
Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism, Sundaram documents an everyday, non-legal Indian
media world, characterised by speedy, small-scale practices of circulation (as opposed
to production). This is a culture of cassette-based music trade, DIY computer
networks, cheap mobile phone repairs and pirate VHS/VCD movies; a ‘world of
informal technological knowledge existing in most parts of India, where those
excluded from the upper-caste, English-speaking bastions of the cyber-elite learn their
tools’.58
This kind of piracy conforms neither to boosterist hype (India as a brave new world
of service-sector growth) nor to Marxist models of economic imperialism (India as a
source of cheap labour). It is founded upon copyright-infringing practices which are
non-oppositional and non-countercultural, and which have little in common with the
cut’n’paste postmodernity fetishised by many US copyright reformers. Instead, this
kind of everyday piracy is ‘a strategy of both survival and innovation on terms entirely
outside the current debates on the structure and imagination of the net and techno-
culture in general’.59 Sundaram describes how pirate distribution networks are
remodelling Indian cities, frustrating the panoptic fantasies of urban planners and
creating new media circuits and industries in ‘the interstices of contemporary urban
growth, disorder and fragmentation’:
[U]rban residents are now assaulted with a deluge of cultural products, cassettes, CDs, MP3s,
VCDs, cable television, gray-market computers, cheap Chinese audio and video players,
thousands of cheap print flyers, and signage everywhere. What is remarkable here is that the
preponderance of these products comes from the gray or informal sector, outside the effective
regulation of the state or large capital. India today has the world’s second largest music

market, a large film industry with global dreams, a mostly gray computer market, and
thousands of tiny phone and word processing shops and cybercafes. And as if from the ruins
of urban planning new media bazaars, which supply these networks, have emerged existing in
the cusp of legality and nonlegality.60
The pirate networks described here provide the material routes for an alternative
technological modernity, generating new forms of media access, emergent social
practices and possibilities of change. This is a notably different proposition from the
liberal/libertarian freedom-of-speech model, which does not address the material
politics of who can speak and under what circumstances. In a compelling essay, Kavita
Philip examines some of these differences. She suggests that the figure of ‘the
technological author’, whose shaky foundations we would expect to be further eroded
by the simulations of digital culture, is in fact rearing its head once more in order to
shore up the proprietary rights system that underwrites techno-capitalist expansion.
She invites her reader to reconsider this narrative of authorship from the perspective
of ‘sites in the global south which are perceived, in the liberal democratic discourse of
development stages, to be mired in the “not yet” ’:
What does it mean that, at the very historical moment that technological authorship seems to
become widely accessible, the law marks off certain authorial spaces as transgressive? What
difference does it make that a particular kind of ripping off happens on the margins of the
industrialized world, among the ‘less developed’ members of the WTO, at the apparent edges
of the reach of western liberal democratic law, where the lines between authentic original and
corrupted copy are being blurred by street vendors and high-tech entrepreneurs?61
Philip argues convincingly that the libertarian reading uses the commercial disc piracy
practised in Asia as a rhetorical Other against which the free-software movement can
define itself. Western technoculture thus maps out a desired narrative for the global
poor, a developmental trajectory from ‘illicit to licit sameness’ which strictly specifies
the limits of acceptable copying.62 Asia is encouraged to imitate the West by
replicating its political and economic systems and by promoting responsible digital
citizenship, but must keep its hands off first world IP capital.
One of the inspirations for this argument is the Bangalore-based legal scholar
Lawrence Liang. In a series of essays, Liang makes the crucial point that legality itself
is a relative concept. He notes that millions of Indians break the law every day, by
bribing officials for essential services, or stealing electricity because no legal sources
exist. These ‘porous legalities’, which characterise life in much of the developing world,
may be the only routes through which contact with the technological modernity that
the West takes for granted may be realised. From this perspective, piracy is not about
morality, freedom or resistance; it’s about ‘ways through which people ordinarily left
out of the imagination of modernity, technology and the global economy [find] ways of
inserting themselves into these networks’.63 Liang does not suggest that these
networks are the only or the best trajectory; his emphasis is on the agency of
individuals and communities within legal frameworks ill-suited to their needs.
This kind of postcolonial IP critique invites us to look past libertarian and radical
discourses, which imagine the first world user as default subject, and to think of piracy

in a wider political frame. It helpfully qualifies the vision of piracy-as-resistance,

foregrounding another aspect of illegal copying – its banality. While media industries
paint piracy as a sin and the neo-hacker generation enjoys the kicks it provides, the
piracy-as-access perspective asks us to remember that piracy is often an everyday act
evacuated of overt political content. Pirate consumption is rarely a self-consciously
resistant act, especially in contexts where legal alternatives do not exist. In these
circumstances pirate media becomes ubiquitous, unremarkable and banal. Hence we
must distinguish between the politics of piracy at the level of everyday consumption
(where copyright infringement is not always directly linked to the interrogation of
power structures) and the politicisation of piracy in IP debates (where piracy becomes
political after the fact).
In a more recent contribution to the debate, Liang adds another layer to this
reading of piracy by questioning the very notion of ‘access’, drawing our attention to a
developmentalist tendency within writing on global piracies. For Liang, there is a
cleavage in the copyright literature between an access-to-knowledge paradigm
(restrictive IP prevents the third world from accessing vital informational goods) and
the familiar consumer-rights arguments (restrictive IP prevents consumers from
realising the full creative potential of digital technology). In developing-world
contexts, the former is usually prioritised:
Access to films and music are seen as frivolous, and not in the realm of the real world
concerns of the A2K [access-to-knowledge] movement. In the world of knowledge and culture
there seems to be a very clear demarcation between essential and non-essentia[l] goods. The
suspicion of pleasure and curiosity stems from an older history where the development
discourse constructs the subject of development as a wretched figure which then enables all
kinds of top down interventions to improve their lives. But if we are to reverse the
assumption of what are the essential needs of people, these divisions between the essential
and non-essential needs ge[t] a little more complicated.64
For Liang, it is essential that the third world consumer is not consigned to a purely
functional realm. The availability of generic AIDS drugs and the exploitation of
traditional knowledge by multinational agribusiness corporations are vital issues in IP
debates, to be sure, but in our rush to draw attention to IP’s political economy we must
be careful not to reduce the third world user to a one-dimensional subject with no
interest in or capacity for the copyright-infringing creative practices at the centre of
piracy debates in the West. As Liang puts it, ‘ideas of access cannot be examined
without simultaneously looking at issues of desire and subjectivity’.65 Hence,
discourses of media access must not become a vehicle for paternalism. With this
important rejoinder in mind, let us now turn to a case study of developing-world film
piracy in which both everyday access and peripheral creativity are foregrounded.
EVERYDAY ETHICS OF PIRACY IN TEPITO, MEXICO CITY
As we saw in Chapter 3, informality has no built-in ethical compass. It is the task of

analysts to describe and compare the attributes and features of specific pirate

An informal media store at Tepito, Mexico City (Livia Radwanski)
practices. An act of piracy can be theft while also being an interrogation of IP regimes
or a ‘new economy’ business practice. Different pirate practices have a different mix of
characteristics, and each must be evaluated on its own terms.
In Mexico City in 2008, I observed first-hand a distinctive type of informal DVD
distribution, which does not fit easily into our established notions of what a ‘pirate’ is.
The following profile of a DVD store in the Tepito market district focuses on the
experiences of one vendor involved in a highly specific and localised business, which is
not necessarily representative of the pirate economy as a whole. Yet this story
highlights the diversity of practices which together make up what we think of as global
piracy.
Buying DVDs in Latin America typically means engaging with the informal
economy. Legal copies of films are available at chain stores and shopping malls, but
their high prices mean that pirate versions are a far more attractive option. For most
Mexicans, 40 per cent of whom live below the poverty line, they are the only option. As
a result, piracy is a big business here. In 2006, an estimated 800 million blank media
units were imported from South East Asia, most of which are thought to have ended
up in the illegal economy.66 One estimate suggests that 300,000 residents of Mexico
City make their living from media piracy.67 Industry data is suspect so we should not
put too much faith in these statistics, but nobody disputes the fact that the pirate

economy is the most important and effective audiovisual distribution system in

Mexico. By any measure, piracy is the default circulatory system for most people here,
the standard from which formal distribution departs. In Mexico City piracy is not
usually about resistance or free speech; it is a mundane and unremarkable activity in
which almost everybody engages in order to partake in film culture.
DVD vendors, ubiquitous throughout the city, constitute a dispersed and ever-
shifting geography of informal commerce. Clon (pirate) discs can be bought from
markets, from ambulantes (itinerant street vendors), from makeshift shacks by the
roadside, from stalls outside metro stations and in most other places where large
numbers of people congregate. Enterprising young men sell DVDs to drivers stuck in
traffic jams or passengers on the metro. Discs cost between 3 pesos (US$0.30) and
10 pesos (US$1), depending on the film, the level of competition between vendors and
the quality of the copy. Much of what is available is the usual Hollywood fare, with
bootlegs of the latest blockbusters hitting the streets within days of the film’s official
release (or sometimes beforehand). This accounts for the largest part of the market.
But the pirate economy is diversified and has a long tail of its own. Some stalls focus
on very specific market niches. In Mexico City I have seen makeshift stalls in roadside
ditches, with signs reading cine de arte (art cinema). In a city as big as this, all tastes are
catered for if you know where to look.
The downtown Tepito barrio is the centre for pirate DVD distribution, and it is
here that the complexities of the city’s informal film economy are most visible. Tepito
covers fifty-seven blocks and is home to 50,000 people. At its core is a giant open-air
market, in which over 8,000 vendors do business six days a week. The Tepito area also
includes an indoor market area housing a further 2,600 stalls, a Sunday antiques and
craft bazaar and a night market where shoes are sold wholesale. All this amounts to an
estimated 15,400 formal and informal economic units and an estimated average daily
turnout of over 220,000 shoppers.68 You can buy anything at Tepito, from candles to
counterfeit watches to cocaine. It is regarded by middle-class Mexicans as a dangerous
area, and few venture here.
Tepito’s history can be traced back to the precolonial period, when it was part of
the city of Tenochtitlan. In the 1920s it became infamous as the city’s trading place for
stolen goods. During the import substitution era of the 1950s and 60s, Tepito was the
place to buy fayuca – electronic and luxury items smuggled into the country to avoid
tariffs. Today, Tepito’s pirate operations take full advantage of trade liberalisation. A
range of factors has contributed to the flourishing of piracy here. Access to cheap
hardware imported from Asia has increased demand for audiovisual content.
Meanwhile, the structural adjustments of neo-liberalism have pushed more and more
Mexicans into the informal sector.69 In this sense, piracy in Mexico, as in most other
nations, is a kind of bastard child of globalisation, an unacknowledged by-product of
economic integration.
Tepito is often held up as a worst-case scenario for copyright violation. An article
in The Economist marvels at the spectacle that awaits: ‘Pirated DVDs abound, with
copies of children’s shows incongruously placed next to pornographic films.’70 On a
2005 trip to Mexico, which included a face-to-face meeting with then-Mexican
President Vincente Fox, MPAA head Dan Glickman visited Tepito to inspect the
markets and collect evidence of infringement. ‘I’ve been to pirate markets all over the

world,’ he commented. ‘This is the largest I’ve ever seen.’71 A Special 301 watchlist
report from the IIPA echoes these sentiments by singling out Tepito as the premier
site for illicit audiovisual distribution and urging local authorities to develop an
‘intense enforcement plan’ as soon as possible. The report also notes, with regret, that
markets such as Tepito are ‘well organized’ and ‘politically protected’.72 This is true,
but only to a certain extent. The area’s reputation as crime centre does not endear it to
local authorities, who have to be paid off regularly. Tepito’s long-term viability is in no
way guaranteed and is always under threat from urban regeneration and gentrification
initiatives.
Tepito’s pirate economy is complex and fragmented. Vendors operate as both
wholesalers and retailers, catering to a diverse array of customers who include
consumers, distributors and other vendors. Stacks of printed DVD sleeves are a
common sight – these are sold in bulk for around 40 centavos (US$0.04) each to other
vendors who wish to do their own duplication or who have sourced discs elsewhere.
Most Tepito stallholders seem to switch between these functions: there is no clear line
between distribution and retailing. Movies are sold alongside pirated music, software
and other consumables. This flexibility is characteristic of informal economies.
Most vendors stock the usual selection of Hollywood movies and are difficult to
distinguish from one another, but others specialise. One stall sells Asian and kung fu
films. Pirated Christian CDs and DVDs are on sale at a nearby stall. Another seems to
specialise in boxing films. Yet more stock various kinds of pornography (one stall
proudly advertised its large zoofilia and hermafrodita collections). A consequence of this
specialisation is that the films available at Tepito and the film cultures they facilitate
are very diverse. This is equally true of the vendors, all of whom are there to make
money but who may have other motives as well. In this sense, Tepito is home to many
different piracies, all equally illegal but not necessarily equivalent in terms of
motivation or social function.
This became clear to me when I got to know a vendor named Juan and his family,
who have sold DVDs at Tepito for many years. Juan’s stall is crowded but simple, with
shelves running along either side, a long table in the middle and a TV suspended
overhead. Shelves are covered with DVDs, piles of printed sleeves and assorted
paraphernalia. Attached to the stall is an open-air browsing section. Here, several
hundred titles are displayed in their cases and hung in racks, ready for inspection or
sale. The arrangement of all elements is simple but carefully organised to maximise the
available space and the visibility of the merchandise. Film posters, including some
vintage promo material, are pasted up around the shop. As well as Juan and his
brother, there are normally a few other traders hanging out here chatting. The
atmosphere is relaxed and convivial.
Juan’s store is a pirate operation, and he freely admits this, but it is a different
kind of piracy from that practised by many of the other DVD vendors at Tepito. Many
of Juan’s activities are better described as a kind of film archiving. His speciality is
Mexican films. At his store, you will find some of the oldest Mexican features in
circulation, such as Mexico’s first sound film, the 1932 prostitution drama Santa,
obscure Mexican go-go films and disco films, the ever-popular Santo series of
wrestling/superhero movies, Mexican Westerns and films by auteurs such as Arturo
Ripstein. There are also several films about Tepito itself, including Los fayuqueros de

Tepito (1982), a feature about the market’s contraband economy, along with
independent documentaries. This is only a random sample: the selection is huge. While
Juan does stock other miscellaneous titles – Harry Potter (2001–11), boxing and
narcotraficante movies about drug gangs, the Luis Buñuel back catalogue – most of the
titles in the store are old Mexican movies.
Juan’s products are sourced in various ways. Many are simply copied from the
official DVD versions sold by established distributors or boutique labels like Criterion
and JC Films. Others are transferred onto DVD from old 8mm and 16mm reels, or
from VHS or Beta recordings of TV broadcasts. Juan and his associates oversee the
transfer from the original format, source content for illustrations from the internet or
from promo material kept in the store and design a professional-looking cover. Juan is
particularly proud of these covers, which are often very impressive and are adorned
with the name of his family’s company.
Juan’s stall also contains a very impressive collection of old movie posters,
postcards and photographs. His father’s stall is overflowing with newspaper clippings
of film-related advertisements and articles dating back to the 1950s. Much of this is
arranged lovingly, though haphazardly, in cheap plastic folders. Sourced from old
bookshops and libraries, it is the kind of material that official film institutions in
Europe or North America would keep in temperature-controlled vaults with computer
indexes. The informal archive that is Juan’s store has neither the space nor the funds
for this. Film culture here is tactile and material, embodied in things you can touch
and take home with you.
What is distinctive about Juan’s form of piracy is that in many cases it is the only
distribution these films receive. Many of the films he stocks have no formal
distributor. Others appear to be titles which have been ‘orphaned’ when studios
changed hands or ceased operation. In any case, official versions of these films would
be far too expensive for most of the Tepito community, which Juan sees as his primary
market. He thinks of his pirate stall as a social service as well as a business, one which
keeps films in circulation and keeps Tepiteño culture vibrant.
Most of Juan’s discs sell for 10 pesos (US$1). His average cost per disc amounts to
7 pesos, which leaves him with a profit of 3 pesos (US$0.30), or 30 per cent. This is a
slim margin, and the business needs a high number of sales per day to be viable. Juan
tells me that on an average day he sells around 250 discs. Like most vendors here, he
switches between wholesale and retail. The DVDs in their cases are sold to shoppers,
while sleeves are sold to other Tepito stallholders or distributors. Bartering and other
informal trading is also common. At one point, I see Juan do a swap with another local
trader – two DVDs for four rolls of toilet paper.
Juan’s DVD store, like many Tepito enterprises, comprises a number of secondary
activities. A proportion of his business comes from selling individual films at higher
prices to specialist collectors or enthusiasts. These are generally ultra-rare films, or
films which have been restored to their original versions, and they can fetch up to
10,000 pesos (US$1,000) each. Some of this business is conducted online with
overseas buyers, including enthusiasts from Europe who order films by email. If there
is a film you are after, Juan will try to track it down for you, transfer it to DVD and
send you a copy. To my surprise, Juan claims that his customers have included Imcine,
Mexico’s state-run film institute – he says that on around ten occasions they released

under their own label films which they acquired through pirated copies bought from
his store.73
It is clear that Juan’s business is highly organised and diversified while also being
thoroughly informal, in that it is untaxed and invisible to the statisticians. Regulation
is limited to pay-offs to the police.74 Juan has no hesitation in talking to me openly
about his work, as he knows the police tolerate his activities. Although this is
undeniably a pirate operation, the purported immorality of this activity is complicated
by the fact that Juan’s distribution is the only thing keeping many of these films in
circulation. Even where legal copies of these films are available, they cost ten times
what Juan charges and are therefore beyond the reach of the Tepito community. So
while Juan appears to be profiting from these sales at the expense of copyright
holders, he is also helping to build audiences for national cinema which may not
otherwise exist. In this sense his activities are contributing to the maintenance of
Mexican film culture.
Still, Juan and his family take little pleasure in their status as pirates. The term is
an uncomfortable one for them: there is certainly no sense of proud oppositionality
here, and Juan’s father tells me that they would prefer to build their business into a
formal operation were it possible to do so. The romanticism attached to piracy-as-
resistance arguments does not translate in this context. Even in Tepito, the practice of
piracy is a source of some embarrassment and plays out as a pragmatic response to
material factors rather than a political act.
This raises questions not only for the study of informal economies but also for our
ideas about the role of formal institutions within film culture. Would the kind of low-
cost, efficient distribution being carried out here informally be possible in a
conventional distribution environment? The profit potential for many of these titles is
slim to nonexistent, and few legitimate distributors would bother with them. One
could argue that if piracy were not so widespread costs would eventually come down
and distributor incentives increase, but given the kind of films Juan sells and the
incomes of his customers it is hard to see this happening.
As we saw in Chapter 3, informal economies predate their formal counterparts
but they can also end up picking up the slack in situations where structurally
adjusted formal economies downsize – a neo-liberal ‘catch-22’ which is felt all too
acutely in Latin America. The archival functions performed by Juan in this sense
represent a privatisation of what is seen in other national contexts to be the role of
the state, but the duties he is performing – keeping films in circulation, keeping a
film heritage alive – clearly have beneficial effects for Mexican national cinema
culture. This presents an interesting counterpoint to the trope of film-as-waste
offered in my reading of straight-to-video cultures. In the first world video store
environment this kind of encounter with STV-cinema-as-commodity invites a
reconsideration of the cultural value of the filmic text. In Tepito the registers of
value are different, even though the space is comparable. In Juan’s store we are
presented with the materiality of cinema in a very palpable sense – spindles of discs,
piles of printed jackets, fading movie posters – but this is no slaughterhouse. For
Juan and his customers, each dusty movie is a part of Mexican film history, a
memory to be protected, and the fact that every one of these discs amounts to a
violation of IP law does not reduce their significance.

During one of our conversations, Juan tells me a fascinating story about a

customer of his. This man, a Tepito local, had a very disadvantaged childhood and
received little formal education. He was also an avid viewer of pirate movies. Now he is
a doctor in the Mexican army – quite an accomplishment for someone in his situation.
According to Juan, movies were partly responsible for this man’s success: he had
taught himself to read by studying the subtitles on pirated discs and tapes bought
from Tepito.
Whole infrastructures of social relations, of exchange and communication and
control, have been built on the foundations provided by piracy. Piracy is generative as
well as redistributive.75 Of course, not all of the phenomena to which piracy may give
rise are inherently progressive, and pirates cannot always claim self-education as a
defence. But watching movies is always educative in a broader way, providing a set of
coordinates for the future self, contributing to shared cultural repertoires and shaping
what is thinkable and sayable. The role of pirate distribution in structuring these
collective cultural reservoirs is immense given its global ubiquity. It is not possible to
speak of global imaginaries or literacies without also speaking of piracy.
This may be one way to reconcile the competing discourses of access and creativity
that structure piracy debates, thus easing the implicit division between first world
creatives and the third world ‘IP poor’. Enlarging our understanding of these everyday
pirate pedagogies to include not only the purely instrumental but also the expressive,
the intimate, the spectacular and the fantastical may help to move piracy debates into
new and fertile territory.
TEPITO POSTSCRIPT, 2010
Two years after I first met Juan and his family, I return to Tepito to see how their
business is going. I wander around the crowded streets for an hour, past stores selling
pirate CDs, baseball caps, sports shoes, porn and fried pork. Juan and his father are
nowhere to be found. Have they moved, or were they taking a day off? I dig up a
business card that Juan gave me, a cheery green design with his details (Juan Castro,
collectionista76) and a mobile phone number superimposed on a montage of old
Mexican screen actors. After a few attempts I get hold of him, and we arrange to meet
up the following day. He tells me an address, the corner of two streets near the centre
of Tepito.
I get there early the next day and chat to Juan and his family as they set up the
store, which is now in an unfamiliar spot. It turns out that another trader took over
their old location. His father’s store, the one with all the scrapbooks and faded posters,
has also disappeared. Now the family is working out of a temporary enclosure,
constructed from metal rods and tarpaulins. It is a step down from the concrete
building they used to occupy.
I ask Juan what happened to the old store. He sighs and tells me that the police
shut them down. This comes as a shock to me: anti-piracy raids at Tepito are often met
with violent resistance, so the police rarely bother. A truce between the traders and
police prevails, with problems resolved through pay-offs or negotiation. Just the other
day I had seen two uniformed police officers shopping for pirated DVDs at Tepito,

chatting animatedly with a stallholder about the latest releases. They made no attempt
whatsoever to disguise the fact they were buying bootleg copies.
Juan suspects that a local chain of bookstores made a complaint to the police, and
that the right kind of pressure was applied by well-connected people. The chain he
names is a local version of Borders or FNAC. Its stores, ubiquitous in Mexico City
shopping malls, stock commercial US, European and Latin American movies along with
arthouse titles and Mexican classics. Juan suspects that they closed down his store as a
way of restricting low-priced pirate competition in the niche market for vintage
Mexican films. He cannot be certain they were behind it, but that’s what he suspects.
In any case, it was made clear to his family that the old business had to go.
Juan is not happy about this turn of events, but he is making the best of the
situation. ‘Now we sell Blu-ray,’ he tells me, pointing to a box full of pirated American
movies. I follow his gaze and scan the DVD covers. The faces of Matt Damon, Bruce
Willis and Angelina Jolie stare back at me. Pirating American movies is fair game at
Tepito; no chance of being closed down for that. Juan can still trade here, as long as he
steers clear of selling anything that might annoy formal businesses with connections
to the police. Hollywood seems the obvious choice.
Juan hopes that there will be sufficient demand for Blu-ray discs, which are not as
widely available here as conventional DVDs, to keep the store going for a while. This is
their new specialisation. The informal archive of Mexican cinema has been relocated to
his father’s home. Juan’s business has moved out of the pirate long tail and into its
mainstream.
Perhaps the problem was that their brand of piracy was too local, too close to
home, or perhaps there is more to the story. In any case, the prospects of Juan’s
business going formal are now even more remote. Juan and his father still dream of
opening a legal movie store, but they will struggle to do this now that half their
business has disappeared overnight. Such is life in the informal media economy.

Cyberlockers like Megaupload have reshaped the online distribution landscape

6
The Grey Internet
So far in this book we have encountered a range of film circuits operating outside the
world of formal distribution. Many, like the DVD street markets profiled in the
previous chapter, are clearly piratical despite the cultural services they provide to
populations priced out of legal markets. Each circuit has its own specific relationship
to the film industry, articulating the formal and informal spheres in a certain way.
Each also generates its own everyday practices of film consumption, creating new
experiences, pleasures and dangers, and instituting new kinds of social and economic
relations between distributors and audiences. These shadow economies of cinema are
fundamental to how film is consumed and enjoyed worldwide.
In this chapter we turn our attention to online distribution circuits situated
between the formal and informal realms, in a grey zone of semi-legality. Having forever
changed the way many of us access movies, the internet is now generating an
expanded range of viewing platforms that integrate legal and black markets. The lines
between the formal and informal are very faint here. The abiding logic is the
repurposing of otherwise legal online infrastructures for informal uses, which is
characteristic of internet commerce more broadly. This results in much confusion on
the part of audiences and industry alike. Many users of the services I discuss in this
chapter would not describe themselves as pirates, and in all likelihood some are
unaware they are involved in copyright infringement.
Let me offer you an example of the kind of scenario I have in mind. Imagine you
are a bored teenager stuck at home on a rainy day. You open up your web browser and
search for ‘online movies’. This leads you to a site called Best-Movies-Free-Online.ru,
which promises ‘thousands of free online films … a great collection of interesting,
powerful, hilarious, full-length movies’. On the site you find links to over 1,000 titles,
helpfully arranged into categories such as romance, documentary and action.
Advertisements for familiar brands and products down the side of the page give the
site the appearance of legitimacy. You browse through the list of titles until you find a
movie that takes your fancy, and then you click on a link which leads you to an
external video-hosting site where you watch the entire movie for free, split into
multiple parts and interrupted by an advertisement every ten minutes. Or perhaps
Best-Movies-Free-Online provides a link to a ‘cyberlocker’, or file-hosting site, where
you download the movie in full as an AVI file.
What we have here is a new kind of distributive architecture for disseminating
cinema. The mode of film consumption described above is increasingly popular among
The Grey Internet 95

internet users, especially young people for whom Google is the default vehicle for film
acquisition. It does not involve illegal file-sharing, but nor is it fully legal. Rather, it
relies upon a complex ecology of intermediary services – linking sites, video streaming
services and cyberlockers – which connect internet users with audiovisual content
outside the channels laid out by film industries. The end result is that users can access
movies online without generating any revenues for rights-holders via services which
may appear to some users to be perfectly lawful, but which in fact operate at the very
edges of legality, at best.
Much to the horror of the Hollywood studios, this shadow online economy of film
distribution is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Industry groups like the
MPAA note with alarm the ‘growing share of unlawful conduct’ that is channelled
through cyberlockers like TopFile, Rapidshare and Mediafire, streaming sites like
YouTube, Dailymotion and Megavideo, and various ephemeral linking sites which
organise this fragmented system into a browsable and searchable database.1 Like the
better-known BitTorrent protocol, many of the new grey intermediaries are sheltered
to some degree by the ‘Safe Harbor’ provisions of US copyright law, which indemnifies
online services against some infringing activities on the part of users. But as the
proprietors of these sites know very well, a great deal of the activity they facilitate is
copyright-infringing, and this is a key driver of advertising revenue. Hence these
intermediary services represent a new combination of the formal and the informal,
combining legal display ads and subscription payments with illicit access to
unauthorised content, plus the odd half-hearted attempt at copyright enforcement.
Rather than passing judgment on the ethics of this distributive infrastructure, the
present chapter seeks to shed some light on how this system works and how movies
are being accessed and enjoyed today by a growing number of people in broadband-
enabled areas.
MAPPING THE ONLINE DISTRIBUTION ECOLOGY
It may be useful at this point to make some basic distinctions between the various
distribution services that together make up the online distribution ecology. My focus
in this chapter is on the ‘grey’ services that sit somewhere in between legal online
movie rental/download-to-own services, like iTunes and Netflix, and the more proudly
piratical peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent (see above). Some brief comments
about the interactions between each of these elements are in order. The relationship
between the formal and informal spheres online is characterised at one level by a kind
of push-and-pull, with formal operators ceding ground to pirates as new distributive
innovations emerge and then trying to recapture it using whatever means are at their
disposal, and at another level by interdependence. Technological platforms and types
of user activity move in and out of the zones of informality and formality according to
changes in law, consumer practice and industry structure. This has implications for
where and how the formal can be distinguished from the informal, as the boundary
between the two is a constantly moving line. What we think of as ‘digital piracy’ is not
just copyright-infringing activity but also that which falls outside what the film
industry and intellectual property law defines as the legitimate channels of

Figure 1 The messy world of online cinema
Video-on-
Peer-to-peer demand,
movie piracy Online video, iTunes,
(including linking sites, download
BitTorrent) cyberlockers services
informal formal
Extra-legal Semi-legal/‘grey’ Legal
(mostly illicit (licit and illicit
uses) uses)
distribution at certain points in time.2 The rise of grey intermediaries further

complicates this scenario, throwing into the mix a new set of commercial and
putatively legal services which work to deformalise online media markets while also
opening up new commercial spaces and lines of business.
These qualifications duly noted, let’s begin our investigation at the formal end of
the spectrum. There is now a wide range of legal services – including digital rental and
download-to-own websites, ad-supported free streaming sites, media players and
devices with built-in movie rental capabilities – which distribute films over the
internet legally. This industry is still in a state of flux. With a growing number of
operators fighting over what is still a small revenue pie, online film distribution has
yet to cohere into a stable and profitable business. But amid this chaos, we can begin to
see glimpses of what a future industry structure might look like.
One model for legal online distribution involves standalone websites offering
paid movie downloads and rentals. In this model, users visit a specific site, set up an
account (paying with a credit card) and then either download their requested movie
as a digital file to be viewed with special software, or stream it via their browser.
Movielink and Cinemanow are the two best-known movie download sites, and their
respective fates are instructive. Movielink – launched in 2002 when Sony, Warner
Bros., MGM, Paramount and Universal teamed up to create a one-stop online shop
for Hollywood content – was plagued by technical problems, poor management and
consumer disinterest. Burning through US$150 million in start-up funding with
little to show for it, Movielink was acquired by Blockbuster in 2008 and no longer
exists as a standalone entity.3 Cinemanow is still in operation, offering around
14,000 features for online rental and purchase. Initially set up by Trimark in 1999
and then acquired by Lionsgate Entertainment, it is currently owned by the
US-based big-box consumer electronics retailer Best Buy. In recent years,
Movielink/Blockbuster and Cinemanow have been joined by Amazon Instant Video
and Walmart Moviecentre, the current paid-download market leaders. These sites
cater only to American audiences, but there are many equivalents abroad, including
the UK-based Mubi, the Australian service BigPond Movies (operated by the national
telecommunications giant, Telstra), the German site MediaMarkt (a European

equivalent of Best Buy) and France’s L’Harmattan TV (an offshoot of the publishing
house L’Harmattan).
The range of movies offered on these sites varies widely. Bigger operations like
Movielink/Blockbuster and MediaMarkt are resolutely mainstream. Mubi specialises in
world cinema, as does another popular site, Jaman, which has a Bollywood focus.
Second-tier sites like Cinemanow, Movieflix and Greencine are the online equivalent of
the DVD discount bin, stocking independent straight-to-video fare and, in many cases,
porn.4 They cannot afford the steep fees for premium content, so their strategy is to
license content under non-exclusive deals for as little money as possible. In sites like
this you will also find a large amount of public-domain content which has fallen out of
copyright, from Nosferatu (1922) to 1940s hygiene films. Some sites even charge
consumers for movies that are freely available in open-access digital archives. While
perfectly legal, this is a common practice among bottom-end and informal
distributors.
Download and streaming sites were once considered the future of movie
distribution. A service such as Movielink seemed the obvious way to harness the
distributive capacities of the internet, the presumption being that customers who
enjoyed browsing the web and watching movies would naturally love watching movies
in their browsers. Yet they have been far less successful than expected. Most of the
companies who tried their hand at this distribution model have failed. A long line of
start-ups – Cineclix, Pop, Spotflix, IFilm, Reeltime, Anytime, Mediatrip, Sightsound,
Vongo, Vizumi, Clickstar and Jalipo, to name a few – burst onto the scene in a blaze of
hype then vanished. Throughout the 2000s, this particular model of online
distribution was joined by a new breed of more convenient and competitive services,
including free video streaming sites (see below), media players and media hardware
with inbuilt movie rental facilities.
Of the media players, the most successful by far is Apple’s iTunes, which now
commands over two-thirds of the US online movie market.5 Apple’s approach has been
to take the hassle out of digital media distribution by building a self-contained media
portal through which users can buy movies safely, easily and cheaply, and watch them
in the same interface. When it began offering movie downloads in 2008, iTunes was
already part of every iPod-owner’s home entertainment ecology and daily routine. This
integrated approach has been replicated by other media companies as they embed
online movie rental services within electronics hardware. New-generation gaming
consoles (Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3), digital video recorders and set-top
boxes (Tivo, Roku, Apple TV), digital television sets and mobile phones now have built-
in features for quick and easy movie downloads. All the user needs to do is select a film
and confirm, with payment made through a pre-registered credit card or mobile
account. This kind of model uses the internet as a delivery technology but the portals
are sealed off from the messiness of the web itself, with all its glitches, viruses and
scams. The journalist Virginia Heffernan compares these ‘walled gardens’ to the gated
estates found in wealthy US suburbs, which offer their residents an aura of exclusivity,
order and safety.6 The popularity of iTunes suggests many consumers prefer the
sealed-off walled garden experience to the jungle of internet video-on-demand.
An alternative approach is the combination of mail-order DVD rental with online
streaming, as pioneered by Netflix in North America and Lovefilm in the UK. Netflix in

particular has had a huge impact on the development of legal online distribution
industries. Since 2006, when it introduced streaming to complement its mail-order
rentals, Netflix subscriptions have sky-rocketed. Some 20 million customers are now
signed up.7 Netflix offers subscribers a range of plans, including streaming-only
packages and deals mixing online and mail-order delivery. The most popular is the all-
you-can-stream plan, which offers subscribers digital access to thousands of titles from
the Netflix catalogue. This has been the number one driver of consumer demand for
legal online distribution in the USA, where Netflix streaming now reportedly accounts
for around 20 per cent of peak-time internet traffic.8
While the success of Netflix – which in 2011 had a market value of over US$10
billion – would seem to suggest a bright future for legal online distribution, it must be
stressed that the revenues these services generate for studios and other rights-holders
are still a fraction of what they make from their traditional partners (cinemas, DVD
retailers, pay-TV providers and broadcasters). The rationale of the Hollywood
executives, so often dismissed as technophobes and luddites, has been to preserve the
integrity of the existing distribution structure for as long as possible in the face of
technological upheaval – and given how vital these revenue streams are to their annual
profits it is not hard to see why. We must also be careful about extrapolating from the
situation in the USA, where uncapped broadband services are relatively cheap and
accessible. Most other nations have yet to experience the same kind of take-up of legal
streaming and download services. Finally, we must remember that the majority of
online movie access still takes place informally. Piracy is still the main game in online
cinema.
How can we account for this persistence of the informal? One issue to bear in mind
is the fact that pirate and ‘grey’ services offer value that is hard to beat. Compared to
BitTorrent, many legal services simply do not offer a user-friendly, value-for-money
experience. Most carry a patchwork of titles from certain studios and not others,
meaning that there is no one-stop shop for online movies. Even iTunes and Netflix
have huge holes in their catalogues where one would expect to find certain new
releases and classics. Thus, for consumers, trying to legally view a digital copy of a film
online typically requires jumping from one website or portal to another to another,
only to find that the movie is not available in your region or that you don’t have the
right kind of hardware. There are also a number of other annoying problems with legal
digital distribution: consumers face a blackout period, ranging from weeks to months,
between a movie’s theatrical season and its availability online; films often take hours
to download; and rights restrictions mean that consumers outside the USA are cut off
from much of the most popular content.
At the other end of the spectrum, these burdens of formality do not apply. Peer-to-
peer networks typically offer fast download speeds9 and a vastly increased range of
titles, including many niche films that are not available through legal channels. A
network like BitTorrent is not beholden to the complex licensing agreements that
restrict many films from being sold legally in certain territories, so it does not
discriminate on the basis of a consumer’s location. Informally circulated films can also
be transferred easily from one computer or device to another, without having to deal
with the copy-prevention technologies that frustrate consumers. All this adds up to a
compelling value proposition to tempt even the most law-abiding consumers.

A great deal of ink has already been spilled about the challenge posed by
decentralised networks to established models of media distribution.10 BitTorrent is
the latest in a long line of peer-to-peer services which, while putatively legal, can easily
be adapted for piratical purposes. Unlike Napster, the bête noire of the US record
industry, BitTorrent has no nervecentre that can be easily shut down. Content is
shared by users on a many-to-many basis and traffic is not routed through a central
hub. As a result, BitTorrent is very difficult to regulate. Grey video-hosting sites,
linking sites and cyberlockers, however, have a different structure and encourage
different kinds of uses. One of their strengths is that they do not use open peer-to-
peer networks, and are therefore less vulnerable to surveillance and enforcement.
Illegal exchange of data occurs between individual users and private websites, many of
which are based in nations with lax systems for intellectual property enforcement. The
kind of enforcement model deployed by the US record labels against Napster users in
the 1990s – which relied on data gathered over open networks – does not work when
people stream content from a website or use file-hosting services. The Hollywood
studios and other major distributors are now focusing a great deal of their efforts on
these rogue sites, which they see as the next frontier for online piracy. For our
purposes, these services present an opportunity to consider some of the novel
articulations of the formal and the informal in online film distribution, as well as the
policy challenges this poses to mainstream film industries. Having mapped out some
of the broad characteristics of the new distributive ecology, let us now consider some
of the key elements that make up the grey zone – linking sites, video-hosting sites and
cyberlockers – in turn.
LINKING SITES
The fictional Best-Movies-Free-Online.ru service that I referred to earlier is a linking

site, a pirate intermediary that allows users to access a wide variety of unauthorised
content hosted elsewhere on the internet. Linking sites operate as an indexing and
aggregation service for both legal and pirated content, but with an emphasis on the
latter. TVDuck, Kino.to, MoviesLinks.tv and other linking sites do not store pirate
content on their own servers, but direct viewers to video-hosting sites and pirate
servers, often based in Eastern Europe, the Netherlands and China, where movies can
be accessed for free. Many linking sites incorporate user ratings and recommendation
functions, and have sophisticated methods for keeping their links up to date. At the
time of writing, the legal status of these sites is unclear.11
Most rights-holders see linking sites as a cowardly attempt to cash in on copyright
infringement while retaining a thin veneer of legal defence. As one MPAA lawyer put
it, ‘It’s really just a different style of helping people pirate. Because they organize links
to content that’s posted elsewhere, they really are pointing people to the content and
telling them, “Go here and you can get it for free.” ’12 Rights-holders also resent the
fact that these sites muddy the waters of the internet, jamming up people’s search
returns and making it harder to find the legal alternatives online. An internet search
for the name of a popular TV show or movie, preceded by ‘watch’ or ‘stream’, invariably
generates hundreds of results for linking sites, many of which lead the user to an

illegal stream of the show after bombarding them with a certain number of ads. When
I last checked, a ‘watch Desperate Housewives’ search produces only one legal option –
ABC.com – amid an ocean of informal alternatives. It is no wonder, then, that rights-
holders see these sites, which generate substantial advertising revenues, as parasitical.
However, linking sites also perform an essential service for internet users. By
indexing all video content, formal and informal, they are doing something that
mainstream search companies are increasingly reluctant to do – provide uncensored
access to the web’s online video content. Under pressure from rights-holders, Google
is starting to introduce changes to its search process with the aim of making it
harder for web users to find pirated content. At the same time, it is directing users
more actively towards legal services.13 The outcome of this policy shift could be a
reduction in the accessibility of pirate material through mainstream search engines,
so linking sites help to fill this gap in the infrastructure which underpins the pirate
economy.
For example, one of my favourite grey linking sites offers a carefully curated
index to 1,500 video documentaries on topics ranging from the history of economics
to the mating habits of polar bears, most of which have been illegally uploaded to
video-hosting sites. It even has rating and recommendation functions, based on
previous viewing history, to guide your choices. Although all the content indexed on
this site is already out there on the internet, it can only be accessed if you know what
you’re looking for – so in this sense the value-add is the expert filtering and
categorisation. A good linking site is like a video store owner, offering
recommendations for the customer who’s not sure what they want to watch. No
equivalent in the formal sphere works anywhere near as well for this purpose. Here,
as elsewhere, the informal online economy is providing workarounds for the
shortcomings of its formal counterparts.
This is not to say that linking sites do not create their own problems. Much of the
linking industry is operated by unsavoury businesses that use deceptive tactics to
increase traffic to their sites. The more hits they receive, the more they can charge for
ads – so they aim to attract users by whatever means necessary. Some sites lure users
in with promises of free content, make them navigate through pages of ads, then
redirect them to external gambling or dating sites. Some are riddled with spyware and
viruses; others sell your registration details to third parties. In almost all cases, the
user is never more than a few clicks away from hardcore porn. In this way, an innocent
search for Gilmore Girls (2000–07) or Modern Family (2009–present) episodes can
bring the unsuspecting user into contact with all manner of internet nasties. This, it
seems, is the price to be paid for the free filtering that linking sites provide. The
grey economies of online video make these strange juxtapositions part of everyday
internet use.
VIDEO-HOSTING SITES
Video-hosting sites, where user-uploaded content can be streamed for free, are at the
centre of the grey internet. There is a very wide variety of these sites, catering to
different territories, linguistic communities and market niches. The lion in the ring is,

of course, YouTube, which was founded in 2005 and bought by Google the following
year. There is now a YouTube equivalent in almost every market: Vimeo, Metacafe,
Liveleak and Veoh for English-language users; Tudou and Youku in China; Dailymotion
in France; RuTube in Russia; Trilulilu in Romania; and so on.14 Some of the more
unusual YouTube spin-offs have included AqsaTube, a video-hosting site for
Palestinian militants, and YouPorn, a site for naughty amateur videos.15
YouTube and its competitors are now the first ports of call for many users seeking
movies online. Promoted as platforms for sharing user-generated content, they
operate in a legal grey zone. While some of the content they host is perfectly legal, a
very significant amount of it infringes copyright, including clips and full episodes of
TV shows, advertisements, music videos and even entire films. This entanglement
between the formal and the informal is structural. Video-hosting sites are financially
reliant on commercially produced content. They know that unauthorised Seinfeld
(1994–98) and Spiderman clips are as important to their traffic flows as home videos of
Maru the cat. More page-views create more advertising revenue, so these sites have a
clear financial incentive to make it as easy as possible for users to upload pirated
content. As a result, most copyright holders would like nothing more than to see these
sites outlawed. However, under the aforementioned Safe Harbor provisions of US
copyright law, video-hosting sites are not held responsible for infringements by users,
provided that they act quickly on producers’ take-down requests.16 This creates mixed
incentives for video-hosting sites. The key to survival in this part of the online
distribution economy is to make your service as attractive as possible to users
(including illegal uploaders) while placating regulators and rights-holders by removing
this content when requested.
Studios and distributors are engaged in a constant cat-and-mouse game to identify
and remove unauthorised content. Keen to prove it is a good corporate citizen,
Google/YouTube has been busily inventing tools that make this process easier for
rights-holders. In 2008 it introduced an algorithmic Content ID system, which detects
unauthorised uploads by running them through a huge database and searching for
matches. If uploaded content is deemed to be infringing, rights-holders can choose one
of three options: block the upload, track how the uploaded content is used, or
monetise it through revenue-sharing advertising deals. Of course, the system is not
foolproof and there are accusations that it results in unnecessary blockage of non-
infringing material.17 From the perspective of copyright holders, however, Content ID
represents YouTube’s first attempt at a durable system for reclaiming revenues ‘lost’ to
informal distribution.
The tracking and monetisation options offered by YouTube and others are,
effectively, formalisation of the informal. Tracking allows rights-holders to access a
breakdown of who is using the content and where. Data retained by YouTube includes
the geographic location of users, how many people have clicked the ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’
buttons, age and gender demographics and so on. For many copyright holders, this
represents invaluable market intelligence. As we saw in Chapter 3, data-gathering is an
essential part of formal media enterprise, and the presence or absence of this
knowledge is a key defining feature between formal and informal media systems. As
Sean Cubitt argues, there is a very strong informational aspect to media distribution,
to the point that ‘money and data are decreasingly indistinguishable’. This information

feeds back into future distribution strategies in the form of ‘vital data confirming the
performance of products in the marketplace, and thereby shaping both the future
handling of the current product and what further products will be commissioned’.18
User-uploaded online video, and the formalisation strategies that have emerged in its
wake, now provide sophisticated tools for generating this industrial knowledge.
The third option, monetisation, involves revenue-sharing of money paid to
YouTube by third-party advertisers. This revenue is split between YouTube and the
rights-holder, providing compensation for the use of the content in a roundabout
fashion. While major distributors see this as better than nothing, they are angry that
they now have their business dictated to them by IT companies. Film distributors feel
they have lost control of how their content is used and must rely on compensatory
gestures from the online video-hosting sites which caused the problem in the first
place. For the erstwhile giants of global entertainment, this is a bitter pill to swallow.
A recent high-profile lawsuit by Viacom International (owner of Paramount, MTV
and Comedy Central) against YouTube brought some of these tensions into the public
arena. Since YouTube shot to global prominence in the mid-2000s, Viacom executives
have watched its users upload proprietary content en masse without authorisation.
Aghast at the number of hits these clips were attracting, they decided to do something
about it. In March 2007, Viacom lawyers initiated proceedings against YouTube/
Google in a US District Court, seeking damages of US$1 billion for repeated copyright
infringement.19 Listed in their complaint were 150,000 clips from Viacom properties
like The Daily Show (1996–present), Mean Girls (2004) and South Park (1997–present),
which had collectively attracted more than 1.5 billion views on YouTube. Viacom
argued that YouTube’s business model was inherently piratical, accusing it of
‘deliberately buil[ding] up a library of infringing works’, and ‘appropriat[ing] the value
of creative content on a massive scale … without payment or license’.20 It was a
sentiment shared by many media companies, to whom YouTube and Google are
nothing more than thieves.
Viacom failed to convince the judge of this position, and the ruling came down in
YouTube’s favour in late 2010. From a public relations perspective, the most damaging
outcomes of the failed suit were the revelations that Viacom had gone to great lengths
to use YouTube for promotional purposes even while the case was underway. Internal
Viacom emails proved that some of the alleged ‘pirate’ content had actually been
uploaded to YouTube at the request of Viacom marketing staff, who were desperate to
create brand awareness for their programmes. According to Google’s chief counsel,
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while
publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing
agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately ‘roughed up’ the videos to make them
look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent
employees to Kinko’s [a chain of copy shops in the USA] to upload clips from computers that
couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of
company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube
by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of
MTV Networks felt ‘very strongly’ that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert
Report should remain on YouTube.21

This bizarre interdependence between formal and informal distributors is increasingly

characteristic of the online video economy.22 YouTube, while proclaiming to be a space
to ‘broadcast yourself’, is heavily reliant on the attractions of professionally produced
content; at the same time, TV networks, major studios and record companies depend
on YouTube’s formidable marketing muscle. What we are witnessing here is a
fundamental reconfiguration of the boundaries between legal media trade and the
black market. The willingness of major rights-holders to tolerate informal distribution
activity, and their capacity to monetise it, will be the key variables in the evolution of
online video over the next decade.23
It is worth noting that similar developments in online video are taking place in
other parts of the world. China’s online video economy, in which a plethora of big and
small companies compete for a slice of the action, is a particularly interesting case. It is
commonly presumed that copyright protection in the PRC is a contradiction in terms,
but recent developments there reveal complex models for IP exploitation. The two
market leaders in online video, Youku and Tudou, have recently introduced a raft of
products which allow media companies to control how their content appears online
and to stake a claim in the ad revenues accruing from its presence there. In February
2009, Tudou introduced ad revenue sharing with select TV and film partners. The
following year Youku opened up its database in a way similar to Google, allowing
rights-holders to block, monitor and monetise content. A range of other initiatives are
on the horizon, all of which reflect an attempt to align pirate practice, consumer
behaviour and advertising markets.24
CYBERLOCKERS
Let us turn now to the final link in the grey internet, cyberlockers, which are rapidly
taking over from BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks as the preferred way to
access pirated content. A cyberlocker is essentially a file-hosting site – a form of cloud
storage. Cyberlockers have been around since at least the early 2000s. One of the
earliest services was Apple’s iTools, which provided free online hosting for personal
content. Now there is an increasing number of these sites. Among the most popular
are Rapidshare (based in Switzerland), Megaupload (the sister site of Megavideo and
Megarotic, based in the Netherlands) and the Italian site Hotfile.
Visitors to a cyberlocker site access content through a central server which acts as
an intermediary between sender and recipient. Users set up an account, upload a file
from their hard drive to the cyberlocker, and generate a URL from which other users
can download the same file. The cyberlocker makes its money from advertising, and
typically requires downloaders to click through a few pages of ads before the file is
transmitted. There is also a subscription revenue stream – heavy downloaders pay
around US$10 per month on some popular sites – but occasional and light use is
typically free.
Cyberlockers are used for a wide range of tasks, many of them non-piratical. For
example, sending a large graphics file from a design studio in Auckland to a printing
press in London would once have involved posting a Zip-disk or using an international
courier. Now a cyberlocker will do the job in a few minutes, and for free. Rapidshare,

YouSendIt and their ilk have revolutionised business-to-business transactions. But

they have also revolutionised the pirate economy. While cyberlockers are, in theory,
supposed to be used for the transfer of documents and personal materials, they can
just as easily be used for sharing MP3s and video files. For this purpose, they are fast,
easy, efficient and (importantly) anonymous: user IP addresses cannot be tracked as
easily as in open peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent. Using cyberlockers, people can
exchange files away from the prying eyes of rights-holders.
The formality or informality of cyberlocker services varies to a considerable degree.
Many are reputable and difficult to adapt to pirate purposes. Others (notably the Swiss
site Rapidshare) are predominantly used for copyright infringement. Rapidshare hosts
more than 10 million gigabytes of data and can service up to 3 million downloaders at
any one time.25 Taking out a paid membership to Rapidshare provides improved access
to this archive and is an increasingly popular choice among heavy downloaders. The
most controversial aspect of the Rapidshare business model, however, has been its
Rapidpoints system, which rewards uploaders according to how many times the
content is downloaded. Rights-holder groups argue that this openly encourages piracy
because users are given an incentive to share sought-after content like blockbuster
movies and Top 40 albums. The Rapidpoints system was abandoned in 2010, but other
sites still offer similar incentives. Megaupload, a particularly murky operation, rewards
users with cash payments – up to US$10,000 – if they generate enough traffic.26
Needless to say, the rise of cyberlockers has unnerved copyright industries. Many
of the enforcement strategies designed to combat peer-to-peer piracy do not work in
the grey zone. For example, three-strikes anti-piracy legislation in France and Spain,
under which the internet accounts of repeat peer-to-peer offenders are shut down, can
neither detect nor prevent anonymous cyberlocker piracy. Like video-hosting sites,
cyberlockers are a global phenomenon: in Mexico there is the enormously popular
Ba-k.com, in Korea there are numerous cyberlocker sites known locally as ‘webhards’
and so on.27 This makes enforcement even more difficult, as users can switch from one
to another. Some cyberlocker sites, especially the bigger ones, will act on take-down
notices from copyright holders, removing offending content and rendering links to
that content useless; but by the time one offending file is removed an identical file can
be posted elsewhere. Linking sites update their URLs, and the game begins again.
Putting aside the question of property rights for a moment, let’s take a closer look
at how cyberlockers are being used by consumers. As mentioned earlier, many heavy
downloaders are now paying subscription fees, typically around US$10 per month.
This provides unfettered access to the data stored on the site and improved search
functionality. So, in effect, these services are evolving into pirate versions of
commercial legal subscription services like Spotify, which offer consumers unlimited
access to a vast collection of music for a monthly fee. This shift to cyberlocker
subscriptions is a significant development, with implications for the ongoing debates
about business models in high-piracy environments. It suggests that many consumers
are in fact happy to pay intermediary services for unlimited access, which should mean
that converting cyberlocker users into legal subscribers will not be too difficult. It also
suggests that the problem is not to do with willingness to pay but with the restricted
offerings of the formal alternatives in many territories. In addition, these recent
developments underscore what is arguably the defining characteristic of the internet

economy in terms of its impact on film distribution: the dispersal of revenues through a
large pool of licit and illicit operators, from linking and torrent sites to ISPs and mobile
phone providers, many of whom are not involved in the media content business per se.
It is no wonder that the erstwhile giants of the film industry are unhappy.
From Napster to BitTorrent, and then from BitTorrent to cyberlockers, the trend
within today’s online pirate economy is towards increasing fragmentation.
Paradoxically, this is combined with integration into purportedly legal services. In
these grey economies, giants like Google and small fly-by-night operators work side by
side. This reveals a deep interdependency between the formal and the informal,
between legality and illegality. When distributors must secretly leak content to video-
hosting sites while retaining plausible deniability, when pirate websites carry paid
advertisements for Sony and Hewlett Packard, it becomes increasingly difficult to
speak of piracy and legal distribution as two separate things. Attention to the new grey
intermediaries discussed in this chapter – linking sites, cyberlockers, video-hosting
sites and various other services – can help to provide a more complex picture of how
movies circulate online and how the political economy of distribution is changing.
INFORMAL ENFORCEMENT ON THE DIGITAL FRONTIER
I would like to conclude our journey into the grey internet by drawing the reader’s
attention to a new breed of entrepreneurial intermediaries that are starting to appear
on the online cinema scene. Like the companies discussed above, these grey operators
seek to monetise consumer demand for online movies – but they go about it in a rather
different way. Throughout this chapter we have seen how opportunistic internet
businesses are devising new ways to profit from online cinema by aggressively
inserting themselves in between consumers and the content they seek. The typical
business model is to attract consumer ‘eyeballs’, if only for a few seconds, and sell
advertising space. However, this is not the only way to make money from consumers’
desire to watch movies online. It is also possible to open up a similar space for
revenue-generation at the level of enforcement, as a growing number of small
businesses at the edges of the media industries are discovering. As we will see, their
activities are often highly unethical.
What I’m referring to here is the emergence, in response to new market
opportunities around digital copyright enforcement, of commercial anti-piracy outfits.
There is now a small army of specialist contractors – P2P traffic analysts, forensic IT
engineers, content protection experts, intellectual property litigators – playing a
largely undocumented role in the war on piracy. They work as freelance guns-for-hire,
moving from one contract to the next, selling market intelligence, technical anti-piracy
solutions and other products and services to rights-holders for use in enforcement
campaigns and political lobbying. This is a globally dispersed industry, and a fast-
growing one.28
Take for example the Bangalore-based Aiplex company, which conducts distributed
denial of service (DDOS) attacks on major pirate sites like The Pirate Bay. Working on
behalf of Indian film companies, Aiplex turns the tools of the pirates against them by
crashing servers and making it more difficult for consumers to pirate certain

content.29 Similar strategies have been used in the USA, where companies like Media
Defender (now Peer Media Technologies) and Overpeer have flooded peer-to-peer
networks with fake and defective media files. The objective is to annoy would-be
pirates and drive them towards the legal alternatives. Other anti-piracy companies,
like Web Sheriff, send out tens of thousands of cease-and-desist notices to blogs and
torrent sites. These anti-piracy innovators have built business models on the back of
consumer copyright infringement. There is a deliberate veil of secrecy around them,
which makes scrutiny of this new line of business difficult.
Entrepreneurial anti-piracy enforcers are guns for hire, hawking their services to
companies desperate for an anti-piracy magic bullet. Many of their activities are
subject to minimal regulation, as the law has yet to catch up with this part of the
digital economy. More than a few anti-piracy enforcers learned their trades as hackers
and renegade programmers.30 Now they sell this knowledge to copyright holders and
the various content protection specialists with whom they collaborate. The pattern is
that players with deep knowledge of the mechanics of the online pirate economy move
in and out of the informal realm, offering their services to pirate websites and
copyright industry bodies alike. Here, as elsewhere, there is much traffic between the
formal and the informal. The most entrepreneurial anti-piracy operators are branching
out into new areas, finding ways to monetise piracy outside the realm of conventional
copyright-industry enforcement regimes.
The most controversial of these entrepreneurial anti-piracy ventures is the
‘speculative invoicing’ scheme pioneered by law firms in Germany and the UK, and
subsequently rolled out to the USA and Singapore.31 The aim with this business model
is to monetise peer-to-peer piracy by suing downloaders en masse. Operating on a
commission basis and assisted by specialist IT providers, entrepreneurial law firms
monitor peer-to-peer networks and record the IP addresses of internet users sharing
the music or movies of the clients they represent. Then they launch a mass lawsuit, in
which thousands of defendants are sued at once. The alleged pirates are tracked down
through their ISPs, and each receives a stern letter demanding payment of up to
US$2,000 to settle the matter out of court. After a sufficient number of defendants
have paid up, the lawsuit is dropped or gets mired in technicalities. The settlement
revenues are split between the lawyer and the rights-holder, with the lawyer taking the
lion’s share.
These cases are not intended to proceed to final judgment. Speculative invoicers
use the courts to lend force to the initial damages claim, but the settlement
transaction is completed outside the formal legal system, as a private arrangement
between two parties. The aim is to exploit the illegality of piracy to open up a new
revenue stream, tied not to the commercial value of the media commodity in question
but to the alleged pirates’ willingness to pay to avoid going to court. As a result,
speculative invoicing makes it possible, in theory, for film producers and distributors
to generate more money through settlements than they could ever have made through
conventional releasing channels. As one lawyer involved in this business in the UK
boasts, ‘We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an
alternative distribution channel.’32
Speculative invoicing is popular with distributors of hardcore pornography, whose
pirate customers are particularly eager to settle quietly. The Electronic Frontier

Foundation estimates that 75,000 American internet users have been caught up in
porn-related stings.33 The technique has also been used on behalf of independent
feature film producers (including the German schlockmeister Uwe Boll) and small-to-
medium outfits like Nu Image (producers of The Expendables [2010]). In 2010 the US
Copyright Group launched the biggest mass lawsuit to date, targeting more than
20,000 alleged pirates of Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker (2008).
Acting on behalf of the film’s production house, Voltage Pictures, the US Copyright
Group sought settlements of US$1,500 per person, opening up what they hoped would
be a multi-million dollar revenue stream.34
Speculative invoicing is the legal version of a mafia shakedown. The purpose is to
intimidate people into paying up as quickly as possible. It is not, then, about
deterrence; nor is it part of the repertoire of mainstream intellectual property
enforcement. Driven by entrepreneurial lawyers rather than rights-holders,
speculative invoicing is highly controversial, and most major film distributors are
keeping their distance. Even the MPAA feels that suing individual users generates too
much negative publicity, which is why it focuses its enforcement efforts on ISPs and
commercial DVD pirates. As a result, the speculative invoicing strategy is mostly used
by smaller law firms and low-level producers. Lawyers peddling this product in Europe,
the USA and the UK can approach rights-holders on a no-win, no-fee basis, offering
them a guaranteed way to make some cash. For many rights-holders in a post-GFC
economy, an offer like this is too good to refuse.
The end result of this model is the disarticulation of enforcement from deterrence,
as freelance anti-piracy stings become lucrative ventures in their own right. Anti-
piracy entrepreneurs like the US Copyright Group make the major studios seem like
voices of moderation, and their speculative invoicing stings are creating strange new
faultlines and alliances in the copyright wars. In some cases, big media is even stepping
into the fray on the side of the consumer, as when a Time Warner-owned ISP refused
to hand over the names of alleged pirates of The Hurt Locker.35 The general trend is a
bifurcation in anti-piracy policy, as PR-sensitive major players stick to established
methods of deterrence and cowboy operators seek out new market openings wherever
and whenever they arise.
By implication, it may no longer be accurate to view the copyright wars as a two-
sided battle between consumers and big media. While it is appealing to view hardline
copyright enforcement in terms of corporate hegemony – a formal state–industry
apparatus stamping out the informal energies of user networks – this is only one of
the dynamics in play now. In true cockroach-capitalist style, new small-time bounty
hunters and freelance enforcers have emerged to pursue the commercial
opportunities opened up by the intellectual property enforcement drive. Some of
these companies work closely with the major studios, but many (such as the US
Copyright Group and ACS:Law) exist within the cracks of the legal and media
industries, teaming up with minor distributors at the lower rungs of the film industry
heirarchy. Like the pirates of Maguindanao (see Chapter 3), some of these informal
operators are deeply unpleasant. But viewed through the lens of formal–informal
relations, their emergence is unsurprising. Opportunities to monetise copyright
violation will increasingly attract these grey operators. Wherever there are scraps,
there are bottom-feeders.

CONCLUSION
It is now a commonplace to insist that the internet has forever changed film
distribution. In this chapter, I have shown how this statement is more or less true, but
not in the way that many commentators expected. While celebrating the
democratising nature of the web, we must also be alert to subtle consequences of the
online tug-of-war between formality and informality. In the market space opened up
by the failure of legal online distribution, grey operators are reshaping distribution
strategy and consumer practice alike. This field is characterised by highly unusual
configurations of mainstream media business, piratical activity and entrepreneurial
enforcement. The interdependencies described in this chapter – between video-hosting
sites and copyright-infringing users, between Russian cyberlocker sites and
mainstream online advertising companies, between hardcore porn producers and
entrepreneurial lawyers – reveal the interlacing of the formal and the informal in the
digital age.
Informality, then, is about more than loss, leakage and theft. As we have seen
throughout this book, informal distribution is generative as well as allocative.36 An
array of new participants are now involved in online distribution, from linking sites to
rights-management companies. While many of these have nothing to do with the film
industry per se, they are still a part of the digital distribution ecology. An expanded
model of how film circulates today must take into account these various
intermediaries and secondary industries. More than a discrete sector of the film
industry, distribution is the movement of media through space and time, and in an
online context this movement is increasingly facilitated by businesses that do not feed
back revenues to producers. These shadow economies are increasingly central to the
political economy of cinema in a digital age.

Konstantin Tovstiadi – http://socialchicks.net

Lobato Conclusion 3/1/12 12:08 pm Page 111
Conclusion: Coordinates for Studying Distribution in a

Digital Age
Moving from fly-by-night distribution companies to itinerant pirate DVD vendors,

from video bootleg rings to illegal streaming sites, Shadow Economies of Cinema has
provided glimpses of the incredible diversity of moving image circulation. We have
seen that informal networks are key drivers of film distribution globally, and that they
play a central rather than peripheral role in film culture. The kinds of stories told in
this book about how movies reach their audiences do not start and end with the legal
film industry, but try to expand our definition of film business to include a wider array
of participants and practices.
At the heart of this hidden world of film distribution are markets, especially grey
and black markets. Cinema’s shadow economies are commercial zones of small-scale
trade and competition. Pirate street markets, informal rental businesses and other
distributive architectures that are so integral to the global media landscape are spaces
in which profit-orientated distributors play a vital role, inserting themselves between
consumers and content and shaping the cinematic engagements thus generated. It is
these structures – these ‘cockroach-capitalist’ networks1 – that most effectively muster
the generative energies of the informal economy.
Throughout this book I have tried to take these networks seriously without making
moral judgments about the nature of the circulation they facilitate or the texts they
provide to audiences. The aim has been to examine the wider film industry in all its
crookedness and contingency, and to consider the research possibilities that arise when
we move informal systems to the centre of the analytical frame. In this sense I have
sought to open up some key terms in media industry studies – distribution structures,
business models, piracy and so on – to some new perspectives. It is my hope that the
reader emerges with an enlarged sense of what being a film distributor might entail.
As we move further into the internet age, a new set of technological platforms are
emerging for cinema distribution. With them come new challenges and analytical
priorities for film and media research. In the remaining pages of this book, I want to
raise a few questions – and offer some tentative suggestions – as to how we might
interpret recent developments in digital distribution in relation to larger political and
economic contexts. Specifically, I want to consider how decentralised, user-driven
networks are changing both the distribution landscape and how we imagine and
describe this landscape.
Clearly, the emergence of technologies that give ordinary people access to the
means of distribution – peer-to-peer platforms, social networks, hosting sites for
Conclusion 111
user-generated content and other technologies for content ‘sharing’ – raises questions
that film studies must confront, and that it cannot confront on its own. We have not
yet settled on the appropriate way to make sense of and theorise this new
environment – and there is much at stake in how we go about this. Which ideas about
digital culture should be at the heart of film studies metaphors and models? How are
we to define the cinema audience vis-à-vis the user or the file-sharing ‘swarm’? How do
conversations about digital film distribution connect to wider conversations about
informational freedom and digital democracy? In what follows, I make some broad
suggestions about how to effectively and critically analyse distribution networks in
digital contexts. I also offer a few comments on where the informal markets studied
throughout this book fit into the picture.
FROM PIPELINES TO SWARMS
I want to begin by discussing a certain idea about the nature of digital networks – a
shibboleth of sorts – that crops up in various places, from Time magazine to policy
white papers to media education journals, and which has to do with the ostensible
dissolution of established distribution structures in a broadband age. The basic
argument goes something like this: new internet technologies – especially BitTorrent,
user-driven content-sharing sites (YouTube, Flickr, Dailymotion) and social networks
(Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Orkut, RenRen) – have forever changed the way we
communicate, replacing top-down corporate content delivery with a many-to-many
model of dispersed circulation and sharing. Twentieth-century distribution and
exhibition platforms are anachronisms in an age when the perceived value of content
is determined by the whims of the crowd, which registers its preferences via user
reviews and recommendations, re-Tweeting of links and social bookmarking. This new
circulatory structure has fundamentally changed how we encounter and experience
the moving image. Cinema, it is argued, has been liberated from studio pipelines and
now circulates freely as data pushed around the internet by waves of user activity. The
audience has become the most powerful distributor of all. Now, as Geert Lovink puts
it, ‘We are no longer at the mercy of cranky reviewers and mono-cultural
multiplexes.’2
This argument, and its variants, can be found in many areas of media business and
scholarship. It is especially popular among the trend forecasters who advise film
industries on how to respond to the challenge of digitisation. The following breathless
claim by media futurist Mark Pesce, which places the digitally networked consumer at
the centre of the contemporary media universe, is broadly representative of this line of
thinking:
The ability to ‘hyperdistribute’ a programme – using BitTorrent to send a single copy of a

programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously – creates
an environment where the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. This
seems counter-intuitive, but only in the context of systems of distribution which were part-
and-parcel of the scarce exhibition outlets of theatres and broadcasters. Once everyone,
everywhere had the capability of ‘tuning into’ a BitTorrent broadcast, the economics of

distribution were turned on their heads. The distribution gatekeepers, stripped of their
power, whinge about piracy. But, as was the case with recorded music, the audience has
simply asserted its control over distribution … This is about the audience getting whatever it
wants, by any means necessary.3
This affirmation, indeed celebration, of the new powers bequeathed to the networked
consumer is a common refrain in media catering to the creative classes, like Wired
magazine and TED.com. It has parallels in areas of academic media studies, especially
in cultural studies-influenced audience research. A growing number of scholars now
see in platforms like YouTube a new kind of audience empowerment, allowing
everyday people to become fully fledged content distributors and to actively shape
media culture in unprecedented ways. This approach to user-driven distribution seeks
to redeem the creativity and agency of audiences – especially fans and young people,
long seen by media scholars as disempowered groups in need of redemption – as they
shift their creative energies to the distributive sphere.
A key proponent of this argument is Henry Jenkins, who since the 1990s has been
writing lucidly on everyday engagement with cinema and television by fans, and has
arguably done more than anyone else to legitimise appropriative and copyright-
infringing amateur production practices as innovative forms of ‘participatory’ culture.
For Jenkins, skirmishes over distribution are part of a wider struggle by audiences to
reclaim the fecund possibilities of new media for the purposes of expression,
collaboration and communication. In his most recent work, Jenkins has been shifting
his attention to practices of circulation, outlining a theory of circulatory culture for the
digital age. Central to this theory is the idea of ‘spreadability’, which refers to the
capacity for ‘easy and widespread circulation of mutually meaningful content within a
networked culture’.4
An example cited by Jenkins is Nina Paley’s 2008 animated feature film Sita Sings
the Blues, which was released under a Creative Commons licence and has circulated
widely through peer-to-peer networks, YouTube and online streaming, despite never
receiving a conventional theatrical release. Success stories like this conjure up an
appealing vision of democratic distribution facilitated by decentralised network
structures. The implicit argument here is that today’s audiences, freed from the rigid
schedules of broadcasters and theatre chains, will find their own way to the movies
they seek. Furthermore, they will share them with their friends, actively contributing
to the promotion of content that is meaningful to them. In this way, the boundaries
between consumption, production and distribution that are characteristic of an
industrial-era media environment become forever blurred.
These attempts to understand user-driven distribution and its challenge to existing
structures are important. As I argued at the beginning of the book, we need to
complement top-down models of distribution with bottom-up perspectives, and a
diversification of our analytical vocabularies can only be a good thing in this regard.
But there are dangers here as well. In drawing attention to some of these, I do not
want to inflate what are admittedly fine differences into major disagreements – but at
the same time, I feel we need to be aware of the risks presented by loose talk about the
democratisation of distribution. In the wake of Wikileaks and the so-called
Facebook/Twitter revolutions of the 2011 Arab Spring, metaphors used within media
Conclusion 113
scholarship are increasingly taken up by journalists and politicians as they seek to

make sense of current events. In this way, media studies knowledge assumes centre
stage in wider debates about democracy and globalisation. We therefore have an
obligation to take this position of power seriously and to avoid entrenching certain
ways of thinking about the movement of media as self-evident truths when they are, in
fact, value-laden assumptions.
RETHINKING INFORMATIONAL FREEDOM
Let us look a little closer at the political dimensions of the digital distribution debate.
There is an implicit claim being made in the arguments of Jenkins and others which
begs to be tested. In their accounts, sharing – involving the unfettered circulation of
diverse content and bottom-up participation by users – is distinguished from a
putatively passive, hypodermic-needle model of distribution, associated with the top-
down delivery of media content from producers to consumers via secure product
pipelines. It is also seen as something qualitatively different from commercial piracy.
Sharing is productive, creative, generative – a driver of media literacy and cultural
participation.
While offering a welcome respite from the anti-piracy propaganda of the
entertainment industries, this celebration of digital sharing is problematic in the way
it constructs a hierarchy of moral value for media distribution, with locked-up
structures of delivery at one end and free circulation at the other. In distinguishing
between a pejorative definition of distribution, characterised by top-down control, and
a ‘democratic’ idea of user-driven circulation, associated with gift economies,
participatory culture and reciprocity, the aforementioned theorists transport into the
field of media studies a Cold War paradigm of enlightened openness versus
authoritarian opacity.
This is not a useful binary. Nor is it a new one. The celebratory discourse around
sharing and user creativity is rooted in a tradition of liberal thought that stretches
back to the seventeenth century and that still shapes the boundaries of the debate
around networked technologies, especially in the USA. With its emphasis on individual
expression, creativity and collective growth through free exchange, the current
discourse around digital networks brings us back to a key tenet of liberal philosophy:
the idea that political freedom and market freedom are in important ways co-
constitutive, and that collective advancement lies in unfettered growth, free speech
and free trade. In this way, the mantra of openness that is central to a variety of
seemingly progressive movements becomes intertwined with a political philosophy
based, ironically, on property rights.
This is a strange paradox, and it ought to be brought out in the open rather than
swept under the carpet. It is one of the reasons why I find the current discussion about
free circulation a little frustrating. At present, the debate is characterised by a wide
variety of claims – about the political economy of media, communication rights, the
nature of creativity, the new economy, consumer protection and so on – rolled
together into a master narrative of digital freedom, eliding the often competing
assumptions on which each is based. What I’m referring to here is not just the idea

that ‘information wants to be free’ but also the conviction that unfettered circulation,
in and of itself, is the answer to the structural inequalities that scar the media
distribution landscape.
If we were to trace the take-up of these ideas further it would lead us in many
different directions – to Pirate Parties in Europe, to free culture groups on college
campuses in the USA, to the free software movement, to liberal copyright reformists
like Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, to consumer rights campaigners, to hacker
subcultures.5 These ideas also connect in important ways with ideologies that,
especially outside the USA, read to the right of the political spectrum. For example,
there is also a strongly libertarian edge to the current discourse on digital distribution,
grounded in uniquely American notions of individual freedom, small government, low
taxes and so on. Thus, when mobilised in certain ways, the idea of free circulation
becomes associated not only with free speech but also with free markets – or rather, a
very particular (and historically specific) ideal of the free market, one that excludes the
untidy realities of informality analysed throughout this book. In this view, freedom of
information and free markets become inextricably linked, making it difficult to
imagine futures in which these two things are not co-dependent. We therefore need to
be more careful about how apparently progressive discourses of freedom and openness
are mobilised within debates about the distribution of audiovisual media, and how
they connect with, and possibly aid, conservative political projects using similar
vocabularies.
Another problematic aspect of the current discussion about digital distribution is
its tendency to reduce complex questions of access and engagement to an assertion of
audience sovereignty – in Pesce’s words, ‘the audience getting whatever it wants, by
any means necessary’. There’s something in the tone of this statement, not least the
appropriation of Malcolm X’s ‘any means necessary’ line, which sits uncomfortably
with me. I am not convinced the aggressive assertion of consumer preference – the
right for people to watch what they want, when they want, how they want – should be
elevated to the level of political struggle, even ironically. A great deal of the current
commentary on media distribution is deeply invested in this kind of talk, which seeks
to reframe the timely consumption of film and other media as something akin to a
human right. If we accept this as the basis for our claims, then the conversation soon
becomes about how best to cater to the viewing preferences of the most vocal
segments of the global audience, while more difficult questions about infrastructure,
equity and cultural capital get pushed to one side. It becomes, then, a conversation
about early adopters – elite users who are already well served by existing distribution
structures – rather than a conversation about cultural power and cultural politics in a
global frame.6
As the political theorist Jodi Dean argues, fetishising informational abundance for
its own sake (the more circulation, the better) is not necessarily the best way to ensure
social and political change.7 A distinction must be made between the unprecedented
scale of networked communications – the fact that more content circulates now than
at any point in history – and the highly uneven levels of engagement within this
communicative field by different kinds of users and audiences. Proliferation is not the
same thing as political participation. To be sure, an enormous range of media is now at
the fingertips of those who know how to find it, legally or otherwise, and we have seen
Conclusion 115
this consistently throughout the preceding chapters. However, this is not the same
thing as saying that we are now living in an age of distributive democracy, and that
these riches are available to all. Nor should we assume that the many-to-many
distribution model of the internet necessarily entails a higher level of audience agency
than was present in older structures.
As we move further into the internet age, we need to come up with ways of talking
about media distribution that do not reproduce problematic assumptions about the
nature and desires of global audiences. We need a broader conception of audience
activity that does not privilege internet users and patterns of activity most commonly
found in the USA and other first world nations. We need to resist the temptation to
ascribe a uniform moral value to types of distributive activity that are extremely
heterogeneous in terms of the content circulated and the motivations of those doing
the circulating. And we need to remember that putatively new forms of audience
activity such as file-sharing are usually extensions of much longer traditions of media
consumption and circulation, and that they interface not only with ‘old’ media
industries but also with informal systems of commerce and trade.
Hence we return once more to grey and black markets, and to their functional
centrality within media distribution. Much as we might like to imagine the
international film distribution business as a purely formal economy (as per most film
industry research), or alternatively as a free economy of digital sharing and reciprocity
(as per the cyber-libertarian script), informal networks of commerce and trade are vital
to cinema’s global circulation. As the preceding chapters have established, this field of
small-scale, profit-orientated operators – from shady streaming sites to street vendors
– is the missing piece of the puzzle for media industry analysis. Placing it at the centre
of our analysis opens up a different understanding of how the film business works, in
which all kinds of markets – the good, the bad and the ugly – can be productively
studied.
This is a project of materialist analysis, in contrast to the idealist ways of thinking
that have shaped much of the work on film circulation to date. Informality has always
been a feature of media markets, and in all likelihood it always will be. In
foregrounding this aspect of international film commerce and showing how it shapes
everyday viewing cultures in various parts of the world, I have merely tried to bring
media industry studies into line with other fields that study the circulation of
commodities through heterogeneous and frequently unruly markets, thus tracing the
outlines of a closer engagement between cinema studies and wider social science. To be
sure, film scholars have fought hard to establish the specificity of film as a medium,
foregrounding its unique properties and powers. But perhaps it is now time for cinema
studies to open up a dialogue with other fields that specialise in cultural circulation,
from anthropology to economics, and to see what can be gained from such an
engagement.
Shadow Economies of Cinema is really just a minor case study for this larger project.
Much remains to be done, and I look forward to seeing how our knowledge of informal
media networks – and their articulation with other kinds of commodity circuits –
evolves over the coming years. It is my hope that future research in this area will help
to fill in some of the blanks within the picture that has started to emerge, providing
more detailed and sophisticated renderings, empirical and theoretical, of the dynamics

of these media systems. In this way we may come to know the informal better, and to
find ways of integrating this knowledge into our frameworks for media and cultural
analysis. The pay-off could well be a different way of thinking about the relationship
between distribution, consumption and everyday life. In following the transnational
movements of films through informal networks, we see glimpses of the extraordinary
messiness of the global cultural economy and, perhaps, new coordinates for cultural
theory.
Conclusion 117
Lobato Appendix 3/1/12 12:16 pm Page 119
Appendix: A Film Distribution Research Guide
Distribution circuits can be difficult to research. Most of the necessary information

and data is not on the public record and can be found only in sources catering to
entertainment industry professionals, or obtained anecdotally. However, there are still
many useful sources that provide insight into how formal and informal circuits
operate. The following guide offers some starting points for your research journey.
Further resources, especially those dealing with informal circuits, can be found in the
Notes.
INDUSTRY SOURCES
Formal distribution industries have their own channels for reporting and discussing
industry practice. While these industry sources lack a critical perspective, they are
often the only way to track current developments. They also constitute what John
Caldwell has identified as an industrial ‘self-theorisation’, providing insight into how
film industries represent and understand themselves.
Trade papers are an important source of information about both formal and
informal film circuits. Key Hollywood trade papers such as Variety and The
Hollywood Reporter provide vital information on box-office openings, industry
developments and recent sales. Screen Digest is a UK-based trade source with a
strong emphasis on new research and data, with coverage of global markets. The
online newsletter Film Business Asia is an excellent source of news for Asia-Pacific
film industries. World Screen, Screen International and Film Journal International
provide an international perspective. The now-defunct Video Business was an
essential guide to video and DVD distribution. A great deal of the material in these
publications comes from the PR departments of film companies, so care must be
taken when citing data.
Smaller national industries may not have dedicated trade papers, but most have
some equivalent publication. Many of these are online, such as the Australian
subscription-based newsletter Screen Hub. Magazines targeting aspiring independent
film-makers such as The Independent (formerly Independent Film and Video Monthly)
and Filmmaker also cover contemporary developments in distribution.
Appendix 119
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Film Business Asia: www.filmbiz.asia
• Film Journal International: www.filmjournal.com
• Filmmaker: www.filmmakermagazine.com
• The Hollywood Reporter: www.hollywoodreporter.com
• The Independent: www.aivf.org
• Screen Digest: www.screendigest.com
• Screen International: www.screendaily.com
• Screen Hub: www.screenhub.com.au
• Variety: www.variety.com
• World Screen: www.worldscreen.com
‘Insider’ accounts of film industries may contain valuable information, although

most focus exclusively on Hollywood. Edward J. Epstein’s books The Big Picture: The
New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood and The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden
Financial Reality Behind the Movies are useful sources, as is his blog The Hollywood
Economist. Industry exposés and memoirs provide another rich source of information,
gossip and data. Journalistic accounts of the inner workings of film industries can also
be illuminating. The integrity of this information for academic research should not be
assumed, but nor should it be automatically discounted.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Peter Bart and Peter Guber, Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)fortune in Hollywood
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002).
• Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent
Film (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
• Frederic Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon: An Insider’s Guide to the Hollywood
of the East (London: Faber & Faber, 1997).
• Jake Eberts and Terry Ilott, My Indecision is Final: The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films
(London: Faber, 1990).
• Edward J. Epstein, The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood (New
York: Random House Film Journal, 2005).
• Edward J. Epstein, The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the
Movies (New York: Melville House, 2010).
• Edward J. Epstein, The Hollywood Economist, http://thehollywoodeconomist.
blogspot.com
• David Mamet, Bambi vs Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business
(New York: Pantheon, 2007).
• David McClintick, Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (New York:
Morrow, 1982).
• Julie Salamon, The Devil’s Candy: ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ Goes to Hollywood (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1991).
• Andrew Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go: An Account of the Cannon Phenomenon (London:
Sphere, 1987).

Industry handbooks offer useful information on distribution models, contracts and

agreements. Jeff Ulin’s The Business of Media Distribution provides an up-to-date
overview of the industry, while two books by John W. Cones (The Feature Film
Distribution Deal and Film Finance and Distribution: A Dictionary of Terms) are also
recommended. Lee Beaupré’s essay ‘How to Distribute a Film’ – written in the 1970s as
a research report for Francis Ford Coppola – is a valuable historical document.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Lee Beaupré, ‘How to Distribute a Film’, in Paul Kerr (ed.), The Hollywood Film Industry
(London: Routledge/BFI, 1986), pp. 185–203. Originally published in Film Comment,
July/August 1977.
• Mark Steven Bosko, The Complete Independent Movie Marketing Handbook (Los Angeles:
Michael Wiese Productions, 2003).
• John W. Cones, Film Finance and Distribution: A Dictionary of Terms (Los Angeles: Silman-
James Press, 1992).
• John W. Cones, The Feature Film Distribution Deal: A Critical Analysis of the Single Most
Important Film Industry Agreement (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997).
• Bill Daniels, David Leedy and Steven D. Sills, Movie Money: Understanding Hollywood’s
(Creative) Accounting Practices, 2nd edn (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2006).
• Gregory Goodell, Independent Feature Film Production: A Complete Guide from Concept
Through Distribution (New York: St Martins Griffin, 1998).
• Mark Litwak, Reel Power: The Struggle for Influence and Success in the New Hollywood (New
York: Morrow, 1986).
• Mark Litwak, Dealmaking in the Film & Television Industry: From Negotiations to Final
Contracts (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2009).
• Schuyler M. Moore, The Biz: The Basic Business, Legal, and Financial Aspects of the Film
Industry (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2007).
• Stacey Parks, The Insider’s Guide to Independent Film Distribution (Burlington: Focal Press,
2007).
• Andrew Sparrow, Film and Television Distribution and the Internet: A Legal Guide for the
Media Industry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
• Jason E. Squire (ed.), The Movie Business Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
• Jeff Ulin, The Business of Media Distribution: Monetizing Film, TV, and Video Content
(Burlington: Focal Press, 2009).
Policy documents, including grey literature, can be rich sources of data and analysis.
Key international policy bodies such as UNESCO and the European Audiovisual
Observatory regularly commission studies on film distribution and exhibition.
Countries with strong cultural policy traditions have an array of film policy bodies at
national, state and city levels: in the United Kingdom, key policy players include the
British Film Institute, the (now-defunct) UK Film Council, Film London and so on; in
Australia, Screen Australia, the peak national body, is joined by state agencies like Film
Victoria and Screen New South Wales. Most of these organisations have copious
amounts of information on their websites, along with downloadable research reports.
Many also publish special guides for film-makers that explain and survey the
distribution landscape.
Appendix 121
The typical purpose of official film bodies such as these is to promote the
industries they represent. However, one can also find other kinds of official documents
that provide insight into the mechanics of distribution. Transcripts of court cases and
judgments are usually made available to the public, and this material can often contain
otherwise unavailable data about film sales and distribution contracts. From time to
time governments also commission independent enquiries into specific aspects of the
film business, providing more rigorous analysis than is typically found in sources
catering to the industry itself.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• British Film Institute: www.bfi.org.uk
• European Audiovisual Observatory: www.obs.coe.int
• Screen Australia: www.screenaustralia.gov.au
• UK Film Council: www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk
• UNESCO www.unesco.org
• Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (France): www.cnc.fr
Private-sector research is another rich source for data and analysis. Some industry
bodies, including the British Video Association and the International Video
Federation, publish annual reports about the activities of their member companies.
Commercial consulting firms (IBIS World) and specialist media industry analysts
(Digital Consulting Group, Dordona) publish their own reports containing up-to-the-
minute research about screen markets and industries. While some of these reports are
not released to the public and are usually expensive to obtain, they often contain
valuable information.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• British Video Association: www.bva.co.uk
• Digital Consulting Group: www.digitaltechnologyconsulting.com
• IBIS World: www.ibisworld.com
• International Video Federation: www.ivf-video.org
• Dordona Research: www.dordona.co.uk
ACADEMIC SOURCES
Academic literature on film distribution is scattered across a number of disciplines. The

largest body of work can be found in film history. Much of this work focuses on the
commercial strategies of the major US studios in the domestic and international
markets. Reflections on the practical and methodological aspects of film history can be
found in work by Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, and David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson. For a more recent overview, see Richard Maltby et al. and Paul Grainge et al.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Robert C. Allen, ‘Relocating American Film History: The “Problem” of the Empirical’,
Cultural Studies, January 2006.

• Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York:
Knopf, 1985).
• Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985).
• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction (Boston: McGraw-
Hill, 2003).
• Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994).
• Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).
• Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith, Film Histories: An Introduction and
Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
• Joshua M. Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of
Movies on Video (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
• Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America Since 1945
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969).
• Thomas Guback, ‘Non-market Factors in the International Distribution of American
Films’, in B. A. Austin (ed.), Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics, and Law
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985), pp. 111–26.
• Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley:
California University Press, 2006).
• Richard Maltby, Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, Explorations in New Cinema
History: Approaches and Case Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
• Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959
(Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 1999).
• Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
• Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–34
(London: BFI, 1985).
• Various authors, History of the American Cinema, 10 volumes (New York: Scribner and
Sons, 1990–99).
• Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2001).
• Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1988).
• Justin Wyatt, ‘The Formation of the “Major Independent”: Miramax, New Line and the
new Hollywood’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 75–90.
• Justin Wyatt, ‘Revisiting 1970s’ Independent Distribution and Marketing Strategies’, in
Chris Holmund and Justin Wyatt (eds), Contemporary American Cinema: From the
Margins to the Mainstream (Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 2005), pp. 229–44.
Scholars using a political economy approach have produced rigorous analyses of the
film economy. American domination of international screen markets is a recurring
theme. Global Hollywood and its ‘sequel’ Global Hollywood 2 (by Toby Miller et al.) are
key texts in this field.
Appendix 123
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Ronald V. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property
(Boulder, CA: Westview Press, 1996).
• Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of
Information (London: Sage, 1990).
• Robert McChesney, ‘Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism’, Monthly Review,
March 2001, www.monthlyreview.org/301rwm.htm
• Robert McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
• Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood
• Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell and Ting Wang, Global
Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2005).
• Janet Wasko, ‘Hollywood, New Technologies and International Banking: A Formula for
Financial Success’, in B. A. Austin (ed.), Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics,
and Law (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985), pp. 101–10.
• Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995).
Studies of non-US cinema distribution are frequently embedded within national and
regional cinema histories. There is also a growing body of work on the film festival
as a distribution platform.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
• Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson, British Cinema: Past and Present (London: Routledge,
2000).
• Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film
and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
• Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).
• Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia (Sydney: Currency Press,
1987).
• Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992).
• Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2005).
• Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and
Imagined Communities (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2010).
• Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit (St
Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009).
• John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry (London: Christopher Helm, 1990).
• Richard Porton (ed.), Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals (London: Wallflower Press, 2009).
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We
Can See (London: Wallflower Press, 2002).

• Kenneth Turan, Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002).
Media and economics literature has much to offer in the way of data. Media
economics textbooks date rapidly, but feature good coverage of the distribution sector.
Arthur de Vany’s Hollywood Economics diagnoses and explains the risk-averse nature of
contemporary Hollywood. Allen Scott’s studies of the economic geography of film
distribution and production are indispensable. Sedgwick and Pokorny’s edited
collection An Economic History of Film is also highly recommended.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Alan B. Albarran, and Syliva M Chan-Olmsted, Global Media Economics:
Commercialization, Concentration and Integration of World Media Markets (Ames: Iowa
State University Press, 1998).
• Arthur de Vany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry
(London: Routledge, 2003).
• Gillian Doyle, Understanding Media Economics (London: Sage, 2002).
• Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen and Adam Finn, Media Economics: Applying Economics to
New and Traditional Media (London: Sage, 2004).
• Charles Moul (ed.), A Concise Handbook of Movie Industry Economics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Bruce M. Owen and Steven S. Wildman, Video Economics (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
• Allen J. Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
• John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (eds), An Economic History of Film (Oxford:
Routledge, 2005).
• Harold L. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, 6th edn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Another useful body of research can be found within work on distribution platforms or
technologies. For example, there is a long-established tradition of distribution research
within television studies. Similarly, there have been many excellent studies of the
VCR, which provide unique insights into the economic history of video distribution
and the contractual arrangements governing this sector of the industry, and other
media technologies such as the VCD.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, The Television Studies Reader (London: Routledge,
2004).
• James Bennett and Niki Strange, Television as Digital Media (Durham, NJ: Duke
• Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington, Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the
World Market (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
• Douglas A. Boyd, Joseph D. Straubhaar and John A. Lent, Videocassette Recorders in the
Third World (New York: Longman, 1989).
Appendix 125
• Darrel William Davis, ‘Compact Generation: VCD Markets in Asia’, Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television, 2003.
• Gladys D. Ganley and Oswald H. Ganley, Global Political Fallout: The VCR’s First Decade
(Cambridge: Harvard University Center for Information Policy Research, 1985).
• John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham, New Patterns in Global Television:
Peripheral Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the
Post-Broadcast Era (London: Routledge, 2009).
• Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2001).
• Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2003).
Studies of informal distribution are far less common than work on the formal film
economy. Media anthropologists study media circulation and reception from a ground-
level perspective across various global sites, as exemplified in Ginsburg et al.’s edited
collection Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. S. V. Srinivas’s study of the
Indian B-circuit is a must-read, as is the work of Ravi Sundaram. The six-country study
Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, edited by Karaganis and published by the Social
Science Research Council, is the most authoritative study on global piracy authored to
date. Other important writers on piracy include Shujen Wang and Brian Larkin. Many
other studies of informal circuits are referenced throughout Shadow Economies of
Cinema and in the bibliography.
WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair (eds), Floating Lives: The Media and Asian
Diasporas (St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1999).
• Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on
New Terrain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
• Kelly Hu, ‘The VCD Experience’, in John Nguyet Erni and Chua Siew Keng (eds), Asian
Media Studies: Politics of Subjectivities (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 55–72.
• Joe Karaganis (ed.), Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (New York: Social Science
Research Council, 2011).
• Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria
• S. V. Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies, January 2001.
• Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2009).
• Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
While research into distribution has tended to emphasise empirical matters over
critical analysis, some notable works provide theoretical perspectives on
distribution. Key scholars include Janet Harbord, Sean Cubitt, Charles Acland,
Jeffrey Himpele and Brian Larkin. Beyond media studies, the field of cultural
anthropology has also examined the circulation of signs and symbols within and across
cultures.

WHERE TO BEGIN:
• Charles Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NJ: Duke
• Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in Arjun
Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3–63.
• Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics, June 2005.
• Jodi Dean, ‘Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics’, in
Megan Boler (ed.), Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2008), pp. 101–21.
• Janet Harbord, Film Cultures (London: Sage, 2002).
• Jeffrey Himpele, ‘Film Distribution as Media: Mapping Difference in the Bolivian
Cinemascape’, Visual Anthropology Review, Spring 1996.
• Jeffrey Himpele, Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
• Brian Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the
Infrastructure of Piracy’, Public Culture, Spring 2004.
• Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria
• Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of
Modernity’, Public Culture, Winter 2002, pp. 191–213.
• Greg Urban, Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World (Durham, NJ: Duke
OTHER SOURCES
The vast majority of information about distribution structures, formal and informal,
never makes it onto the public record, so it is often necessary to speak directly to the
people involved. Interviews with distributors and pirates generate fascinating
insights into how the distribution economy works. Most national film agencies, such
as the BFI, publish contact details for distribution companies on their websites. Many
distributors will appreciate your interest in their work and are usually more than
happy to talk about their business (although those in the informal sector may be less
willing to volunteer information).
Websites and blogs are a rich source of information on various aspects of
distribution, especially digital distribution. There is very strong coverage of intellectual
property issues at websites such as ArsTechnica.com and IP-Watch.org. Information
on social media platforms, file-sharing and other informal digital circuits can be found
at TorrentFreak.com, AllThingsD.com and Wired.com. Noteworthy bloggers in this
area include Greg Sandoval (http//news.cnet.com/media-maverick/), Eriq Gardner
(http://reporter.blogs.com/thresq/), Edward Jay Epstein (http//thehollywoodeconomist.
blogspot.com/) and Mike Masnick (www.techdirt.com).
Appendix 127
Lobato Notes 9/1/12 3:59 pm Page 129
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics vol. 1 no. 2 (2005),
pp. 193–214.
2. Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–34
(London: BFI, 1985); John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: US and European
Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001). Parallel to this is an emerging body of work on film festivals as
distribution networks, including Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Film Festival Networks: The New
Topographies of Cinema in Europe’, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), pp. 82–107; Marijke de Valck, Film
Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2007); Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival
Circuit (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009).
3. John Sinclair, Liz Jacka and Stuart Cunningham, New Patterns in Global Television:
Peripheral Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Michael Curtin, Playing to the
World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007); Albert Moran, New Flows in Global TV (Bristol: Intellect, 2009).
4. Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of
Information (London: Sage, 1990), p. 162. The passage is italicised in the original.
5. Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’.
6. For example: Steve Jones, ‘Music That Moves: Popular Music, Distribution and Network
Technologies’, Cultural Studies vol. 16 no. 2 (2002), pp. 213–32; Benjamin Lee and Edward
LiPuma, ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity’, Public Culture vol. 14
no. 1 (2002), pp. 191–213; Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw (eds), Circulation and the City:
Essays on Urban Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
7. Exceptions, such as India’s sprawling black market in cable TV connections, certainly exist.
Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2009).
1 DISTRIBUTION FROM ABOVE AND BELOW
1. Scott Hettrick, ‘Sony Puts its Faith in Church-based Promo’, Video Business, 24 October
2005, p. 6. Note that after its initial success with church screenings, Cloud Ten teamed up
Notes 129
with Sony for home video distribution. Other studios are now working with faith-based
markets via speciality divisions, such as Fox Faith.
2. Rob Walker, ‘God is in the Distribution’, New York Times Magazine, 13 November 2005,
p. 38. Walker notes that the film did have a small theatrical release some months later, in
early 2001; however, the church screenings and DVD sales were the primary drivers of
distribution.
3. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989), online.
4. This has a more specific character in Marxist discourse. For Marx and Engels, distribution
was the intervening process between production and consumption which stratifies
capitalist society into workers and the bourgeoisie through its dissemination of economic
and social inequality. See Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics
vol. 1 no. 2 (2005), pp. 193–214. A key text on distributive justice is John Rawls’ A Theory of
Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1971).
5. Republican candidate John McCain went so far as to label Obama as the aspirational
‘Redistributionist in chief’ during the 2008 presidential election.
6. Cited in Richard Malin Ohmann, Making and Selling Culture (Hanover: Weslyan University
Press, 1996), p. 21.
7. Precursors to the exchanges are sometimes traced back further, to 1896; see Max Alvarez,
‘The Origins of the Film Exchange’, Film History vol. 17 (2005), pp. 431–65. For a European
perspective on early cinema distribution, see Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff (eds),
Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 (Eastleigh: John Libbey,
2007).
8. Andrew F. Hanssen, ‘The Block Booking of Films Re-examined’, in John Sedgwick and
Michael Pokorny (eds), An Economic History of Film (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 125–26.
A network of high-volume ‘junk exchanges’ also existed – cut-price operators who leased
older reels of dubious print quality for around 3 cents per foot, catering to the bottom end
of the market. See Alvarez, ‘The Origins of the Film Exchange’, p. 433.
9. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London:
Routledge, 2003), p. 120.
10. Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins, ‘Hollywood for the 21st Century: Global Competition for
Critical Mass in Image Markets’, Cambridge Journal of Economics vol. 16 no. 1 (1992),
pp. 1–22; Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s, History of the
American Cinema Vol. 6 (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1999); Edward Epstein, The Big
Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 2005).
11. Epstein, The Big Picture, p. 107; see also Jeff Ulin, The Business of Media Distribution:
Monetizing Film, TV, and Video Content (New York: Focal Press, 2009).
12. Thomas Guback, ‘Non-Market Factors in the International Distribution of American Films’,
in Bruce A. Austin (ed.), Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics, and Law (Norwood,
NJ: Ablex, 1985), p. 113; Janet Wasko, How Hollywood Works (London: Sage, 2003).
13. Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 4. See also
Douglas Gomery, ‘Economic Externalities: Looking Beyond Box-Office Returns’, Velvet Light
Trap vol. 64 (2009), pp. 105–6; and Ramon Lobato, ‘Invisible Audiences for Australian
Films? Cinema and its Many Publics’, Metro vol. 160 (2009), pp. 162–5.
14. Richard Natale, ‘Hollywood’s Numbers Game: The Box-Office Guess-timates’, The Los
Angeles Times, 20 December 1999.
15. Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 2.

16. Ibid., p. 10.

17. Nick Roddick, ‘Cinema on Demand’, Sight & Sound October 2007, p. 14; Dina Iordanova,
‘Rise of the Fringe: Global Cinema’s Long Tail’, in Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and
Belén Vidal (eds), Cinema at the Periphery (St Andrews: St Andrews University Press, 2010),
pp. 23–45.
18. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006), p. 4.
19. Charles R. Acland, ‘Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits: Cultural Authority and the
Film Council Movement, 1946–1957’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing
Film Studies (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 158.
20. The Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, with its extensive 16mm film collection
of European and experimental works, became the centre of a nontheatrical circulatory
network reaching thousands of schools, museums, universities and individual borrowers.
See Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). For more on alternative 16mm
distribution networks, see Acland, ‘Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits’; Cecile
Starr (ed.), Ideas on Film: A Handbook for the 16mm Film User (New York: Funk and
Wagnalls, 1951).
21. Patricia Zimmermann, ‘Startling Angles: Amateur Film and the Early Avant-Garde’, in
Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde,
1919–1945 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1995), p. 143. See also Zimmerman’s
Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993); Jan-Christopher Horak, ‘Avant-Garde Film’, in Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood
as a Modern Business Enterprise, History of the American Cinema Vol. 5 (New York: Scribner
and Sons, 1993), pp. 387–91.
22. Eric Schaefer, ‘Plain Brown Paper: Adult Films for the Home Market, 1930–1969’, in Jon
Lewis and Eric Smoodin (eds), Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History
and Method (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 214. Other examples in the
paragraph above are also from Schaefer’s essay.
23. Kerry Segrave, Piracy in the Motion Picture Industry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003).
See also Chapter 5 of this book for more on piracy.
24. S. V. Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
vol. 4 no. 1 (2003), pp. 40–62.
25. Jeffrey Himpele, ‘Film Distribution as Media: Mapping Difference in the Bolivian
Cinemascape’, Visual Anthropology Review vol. 12 no. 1 (1996), pp. 48 and 53. See also his
monograph Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes
26. Ibid., p. 58.
27. Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, p. 19.
28. The quote is from Laikwan Pang, ‘Mediating the Ethics of Technology: Hollywood and
Movie Piracy’, Culture, Theory & Critique vol. 45 no. 1 (2004), p. 20. See also Lucas
Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NJ: Duke
29. Ekky Imanjaya, ‘The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation
Cinema as Cult Films’, Colloquy vol. 18 (2009), pp. 143–59; personal communication,
April 2010.
Notes 131
2 THE STRAIGHT-TO-VIDEO SLAUGHTERHOUSE
1. I use the term ‘straight-to-video’, which is the norm in the UK and Australia, rather than
‘direct-to-video’, the American equivalent.
2. Anita Elberse and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, ‘Superstars and Underdogs: An Examination of the
Long-Tail Phenomenon in Video Sales’, Working Paper, Harvard Business School, 2008,
p. 35. The data used by Elberse and Oberholzer-Gee is based on a five-year sample
(2000–05) from Nielsen Videoscan, the leading monitoring service for the US video
sell-through market. Figures for original release windows were as follows: direct-to-video
59 per cent, theatrical 26 per cent, television 25 per cent. Note that around 15 per cent of
titles were released in multiple windows simultaneously (day-and-date releases in all
windows, simultaneous cable and video releases and so forth), which is why the sum of
these figures exceeds 100 per cent.
3. Mark Schilling, ‘Another Shock to the System’, The Japan Times, 23 July 2003; Wheeler
Winston Dixon, ‘An Interview with Takashi Shimizu’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video
vol. 22 no. 1 (2005), pp. 1–16; Anchalee Chaiworaporn, ‘Direct-to-Vid Titles Flood
Marketplace (Thailand)’, Variety, 23 June 2003; Sudarat Musikawong, ‘Working Practices in
Thai Independent Film Production and Distribution’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies vol. 8 no. 2
(2007), pp. 248–61.
4. Tino Balio, ‘Adjusting to the New Global Economy: Hollywood in the 1990s’, in Albert
Moran (ed.), Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives (London:
Routledge, 1996), p. 23.
5. Cited in Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow,
1980–1989, History of the American Cinema Vol. 10 (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1999),
p. 117.
6. Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2001), pp. 118–22.
7. This is not to say, however, that STV is or ever has been entirely the preserve of
independents. For example, the video rental giant Blockbuster for a time produced its own
STV/made-for-TV productions, including Richard Lang’s Texas (1994) (Wasser, Veni, Vidi,
Video, p. 148). The majors (Disney especially) have also been active in STV production.
Warner Bros. has a series of what it calls ‘DVD premieres’, a euphemism for straight-to-
video.
8. Ibid.
9. David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam,
History of the American Cinema Vol. 9 (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1990), pp. 3–4.
10. David Landis, ‘Erotic Thrillers Appeal to Senses and Producers’, USA Today, 25 March 1993.
11. Andrew Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go: An Account of the Cannon Phenomenon (London: Sphere,
1987), p. 61.
12. On the industrial context of erotic thrillers, see Robert Eberwein, ‘The Erotic Thriller’, Post
Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities vol. 17 no. 3 (1998), pp. 25–33; Linda Ruth
Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2005); David Andrews, Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in its
Contexts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Nina K. Martin, Sexy Thrills:
Undressing the Erotic Thriller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
13. Rolf Potts, ‘The New B Movie’, New York Times Magazine, 7 October 2007, p. 18.

14. Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, p. 149.

15. Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, pp. 116–18.
16. The recent domination of the DVD sell-through market by TV box sets, along with the role
played by cable channels like HBO in film financing, is further evidence of the close links
between the STV and television industries. See ibid., p. 117; Gautam Malkani, ‘HBO Banks
on UK Homebodies’, Financial Times, 10 February 2004, p. 10.
17. Nick Roddick, ‘Loss of the Money Man’, Sight & Sound July 2011, p. 17.
18. Lisa Oldham Stokes and Michael Hoover, City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema (New York: Verso,
1999); Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese
Film and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
19. Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go, p. 17. Most Cannon films received a minor theatrical release, but
their primary circulation channel was video. ‘Globus’ refers to Golan’s business partner in
Cannon, Yoram Globus.
20. Roger Ebert, cited in ibid., p. 56.
21. Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, p. 125.
22. Simon During, ‘Popular Culture on a Global Scale: A Challenge for Cultural Studies?’, Critical
Inquiry vol. 23 no. 4 (1997), p. 814.
23. Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience. Both Curtin and Wasser also suggest that
the kind of fast-and-cheap film production involved in presale deals created a situation
where the virtual guarantee of profits upfront meant that there was less incentive on
the part of producers to maintain quality control of their products, contributing to
the late-1980s shakeout in the USA and the Hong Kong industry’s deep slump in the
mid-1990s.
24. Ding-Tzann Lii, ‘A Colonized Empire: Reflections on the Expansion of Hong Kong Films
in Asian Countries’, in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
(London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 122–41.
25. The major studios do this as well. See Epstein, The Big Picture.
26. Yule, Hollywood A Go-Go, p. 76.
27. These are also markets that have traditionally been more receptive to black lead actors
than the USA. Indeed, Williamson’s blackness is played up in his Italian productions –
hence the title, Cobra Nero (1987) – but played down in his US-produced post-
Blaxploitation films. In the poster art for the Williamson vehicle Foxtrap (1986),
Williamson is sketched in such a way that he appears white. The racial politics of these
B-genres are fascinating, and while I do not have time to go into them here this appears to
be a fruitful area for future research.
28. Meaghan Morris, ‘Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Making
of a Global Popular Culture’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies vol. 5 no. 2 (2004), pp. 181–99.
Other work in this area includes: Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’;
Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Terms of Transition: The Action Film in East-West Perspective’, in Jenny
Kwow Wah Lau (ed.), Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East
Asia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), pp. 167–78; Leon Hunt, ‘The Hong
Kong/Hollywood Connection: Stardom and Spectacle in Transnational Action Cinema’, in
Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 269–83;
Andrew Willis, ‘Forced to Fight (1991): American Martial Arts Movies and the Exploitation
Film Tradition’, Scope vol. 18 (2010), www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=
jul2000&id=285; and Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu (eds),
Notes 133
Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
29. Morris, ‘Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema’, pp. 189–90.
30. Ibid., p. 184.
31. Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2005).
32. B. Hills, ‘Gone with the Wind – $40m: The Rise and Fall of a Movie Mogul’, The Herald
(Melbourne), 2 May 1998, n.p. Ginnane now divides his time between Australia and the
USA, and is the current head of the Screen Producers Association of Australia.
33. Philip Adams, review of Turkey Shoot, The Sun (Melbourne), 27 July 1982, n.p.
34. Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia (Sydney: Currency Press,
1987), p. 32.
35. Ibid., p. 31. See also Antony I. Ginnane, Some Scenes Objectionable aka Reel Life–Real Life,
draft memoir (forthcoming).
36. Telephone interview with Antony I. Ginnane, 23 January 2008.
37. An IFM office was opened in Hong Kong briefly, but Ginnane pulled out of Asia following
the wall street crash 1987.
38. Ginnane, Some Scenes Objectionable, n.p.
39. Telephone interview with Antony I. Ginnane, 23 January 2008.
40. Eddie Romero, who directed several of the IFM productions, is one of the most prolific and
prominent directors in the Philippines.
41. See the following works by Franco Moretti: ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, Modern
Language Quarterly vol. 61 no. 1 (2000), pp. 207–28; Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for
a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005).
42. Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, pp. 207, 208.
43. There was at one point an STV version of the Oscars named the DVD Premiere Awards,
later known as the DVD Exclusive Awards.
44. For a perceptive discussion of canon formation, see Janet Staiger, ‘The Politics of Film
Canons’, Cinema Journal vol. 24 no. 3 (1985), pp. 4–23.
45. Gavin Smith, ‘Straight to Video’, Film Comment vol. 35 no. 6 (1995), p. 80.
46. Cited in Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video, p. 123.
47. Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age
(London: BFI, 2001), pp. 111–12. Note that India’s annual output is in fact much higher
than this. According to Screen Digest, 1,288 films were produced in India in 2008, not
counting informally distributed titles (see summary at: ‘Get the Picture Box Office
Statistics’, Screen Australia website, 2009, http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/gtp/
acompfilms.html).
48. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (New York:
Hyperion, 2006).
49. Ibid., p. 130.
50. There is a section of Anderson’s book called ‘Is the Long Tail Full of Crap?’ (Ibid.,
pp. 115–17) in which Anderson addresses this point, concluding, reluctantly, that the Long
Tail is indeed full of crap. However, this isolated moment contradicts the overall rhetoric of
the book, which works around the aforementioned, decidedly romantic logic of hidden
cultural value.

3 INFORMAL MEDIA ECONOMIES
1. For example, see Sundaram, Pirate Modernity; Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media,
Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2008);
Jeffrey Himpele, Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics and Indigenous Identity in the Andes
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and
Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002).
2. Keith Hart, ‘On the Informal Economy: The Political History of an Ethnographic Concept’,
CEB Working Paper No. 09/042 (Brussels: Centre Emile Berheim, 2009), p. 9.
3. For an indicative range of definitions and uses, see: Keith Hart, ‘Informal Income
Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies vol. 11
no. 1 (1973), pp. 61–89; Philip Mattera, Off the Books: The Rise of the Underground Economy
(London: Pluto Press, 1985); Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, ‘World Underneath:
The Origins, Dynamics, and Effects of the Informal Economy’, in Alejandro Portes, Manuel
Castells and Lauren A. Benton (eds), The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less
Developed Countries (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 11–40;
Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York:
Harper & Row, 1989); Ananya Roy and Nezar Alsayyad (eds), Urban Informality:
Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham:
Lexington, 2004).
4. Peter Guttman, ‘The Subterranean Economy’, Financial Analysts’ Journal
November–December 1978, pp. 26–8; Edgar L. Feige, ‘How Big is the Irregular Economy?’,
Challenge vol. 22 no. 5 (1979), pp. 5–13.
5. Friedrich Schneider and Robert Klinglmair, ‘Shadow Economies Around the World: What
Do We Know?’, IZA discussion paper (Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der
Arbeit/Institute for the Study of Labour, 2004), http://ftp.iza.org/dp1043.pdf. Note that
studies use different methodologies (including cash circulation measurement, electricity use
measurement and surveys) and terminology (analogue concepts include shadow economy,
subterranean economy and irregular economy).
6. International Labour Office, Employment, Incomes and Equality: A Strategy for Increasing
Productive Employment in Kenya (Geneva: ILO, 1972), p. 6.
7. Hart’s paper was presented at a conference in 1971 and published in 1973. It notes, among
other things, the heavily gendered nature of the informal economy, which accounted for the
activities of 95 per cent of active women in Ghana compared to 40 per cent of active men
(Hart, ‘On the Informal Economy’).
8. See S. V. Sethuraman, ‘The Urban Informal Sector: Concept, Measurement and Policy’,
International Labour Review vol. 114 no. 1 (1976), pp. 69–81; Ray Bromley and Chris Gerry,
Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities (Chichester: Wiley, 1979); Cathy A. Rakowski,
‘The Informal Sector Debate, Part 2: 1984–1993’, in Cathy A. Rakowski (ed.), Contrapunto:
The Informal Sector Debate in Latin America (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994), pp. 31–50; Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Jon Shefner, Out of the Shadows: Political
Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
9. De Soto, The Other Path and The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and
Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic, 2000).
Notes 135
10. Castells and Portes, ‘World Underneath’, p. 15.

11. Howard Karger, Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy (San Francisco:
Berrett-Koehler, 2005).
12. For recent critiques of labour practices in creative industries, see: Andrew Ross, Nice Work If
You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press,
2009); David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural
Industries (London: Routledge, 2010).
13. Often ‘offshoring’ of production has disastrous environmental consequences, as was the
case when Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000) was shot in Ko Phi Phi Ley in Thailand.
See Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2.
14. Marina Hyde, ‘Saadi Gaddafi’s Hollywood Adventure’, Guardian, 27 May 2010, p. 3; Eriq
Gardner, ‘How to Beat the Indie Financing System’, The Hollywood Reporter, 23 September
2010, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-beat-indie-financing-system-28267
15. Philip Harding and Richard Jenkins, The Myth of the Hidden Economy: Towards a New
Understanding of Informal Economic Activity (Milton Keynes: Open Press University, 1989),
p. 15.
16. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), p. 191.
17. Rapidly increasing ticket prices in multiplexes since the advent of 3D also drive consumers
towards piracy as a no-cost alternative, producing informality where it did not previously
exist.
18. This point is developed further, and most eloquently, by Ananya Roy in ‘Urban Informality:
Toward an Epistemology of Planning’, Journal of the American Planning Association vol. 71
no. 2 (2005), pp. 147–58.
19. There are many examples of informal labour organisation on a smaller scale, and such
efforts are often very effective. See Arbind Singh, ‘Organizing Street Vendors’, Seminar
vol. 491 (2000), http://www.india-seminar.com/2000/491/491%20arbind%20singh.htm
20. This is noticeable in some of the celebratory writing on pirate media distribution, especially
file-sharing (see Chapter 5 and Conclusion).
21. Hart, ‘Informal Income Opportunities’; UN-HABITAT, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report
on Human Settlements (London: United Nations Human Settlements Programme/Earthscan,
2003).
22. Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics vol. 1 no. 2 (2005), pp. 193–213.
23. Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair (eds), Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas
(St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1999).
24. These examples are discussed in Kerry Segrave, Piracy in the Motion Picture Industry
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003).
25. The large market for Evangelical media in the USA is of considerable interest to the major
studios, which see it as a growth area. However, the studios have been obstructed in their
efforts to expand into this market by the fact that their analysts ‘have found it difficult to
gain the kind of point-of-sale data that can help them decide what types of content work
best’. Wendy Wilson, ‘Building Up Data for the Christian Segment’, Video Business,
12 February 2007.
26. Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’.
27. See also the insertion of customised pornographic sequences into Bangladeshi action
movies as described by Lotte Hoek, ‘Cut-Pieces as Stag Film: Bangladeshi Pornography in
Action Cinema’, Third Text vol. 24 no. 1 (2010), pp. 135–48.

28. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 49.
29. Abdoumaliq Simone, ‘Pirate Towns: Reworking Social and Symbolic Infrastructures in
Johannesburg and Doula’, Urban Studies vol. 43 no. 2 (2006), pp. 357–70.
30. Ibid., p. 358.
31. Ibid., p. 367.
32. Arif Hasan, ‘The Changing Nature of the Informal Sector in Karachi due to Global
Restructuring and Liberalization, and its Repercussions’, in Roy and Alsayyad, Urban
Informality, pp. 67–78.
33. Ibid., p. 73.
34. Gladys and Oswald Ganley, Global Political Fallout: The VCR’s First Decade (Cambridge:
Harvard University Center for Information Policy Research, 1985), p. 67. For different uses
of informal media distribution practices in the Iranian context, see Annabelle Sreberny-
Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and
the Iranian Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
35. Barbara Klinger, ‘Contraband Cinema: Piracy, Titanic, and Central Asia’, Cinema Journal
vol. 49 no. 2 (2010), pp. 106–24. Another example concerns the 2009 film Balibo, an
Australian docu-drama about the murder of six Aussie journalists during Indonesia’s 1975
invasion of East Timor. Upon its release, the film was banned by the Indonesian
government, but pirate copies were almost immediately widely available in street markets.
There is some evidence to suggest that the ban may have actually been beneficial for the
film’s reputation in Indonesia, adding a layer of intrigue to what would otherwise have been
an obscure movie screened only in specialist cinemas and expat clubs. See Nivell Rayda,
‘Balibo Film Ban Backfires Badly’, The Jakarta Globe, 14 December 2009,
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/balibo-film-ban-backfires-badly/347311
36. Cited in John Chesterman and Andy Lipman, The Electronic Pirates: DIY Crime of the Century
(London: Routledge, 1988), p. 7.
37. For more on Sixth Generation distribution structures, see Jenny Kwok Wah Lau,
‘Globalization and Youthful Subculture: The Chinese Sixth-Generation Films and the Dawn
of a New Century’, in Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (ed.), Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular
Media in Transcultural East Asia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), pp. 13–27.
38. Jeffrey M. Tupas and Jeoffrey Maitem, ‘Bootleg DVDs of Maguindanao Massacre on Sale’,
Inquirer, 28 December 2009, http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/regions/view/
20091228-244373/Bootleg-DVDs-of-Maguindanao-massacre-on-sale
39. A well-informed colleague from a former Soviet state once told me that his nation’s
erstwhile prime minister had made a fortune selling and renting out bootleg DVDs, under
the auspices of a state-run company during the Soviet era. This has not been documented in
the English-language media but, according to my colleague, it is common knowledge in the
relevant nation.
40. Joe Karaganis (ed.), Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (New York: Social Science Research
Council, 2011), p. 153.
41. For Pertierra, the social effects of this informal new media landscape include the
integration of Cuba into a Latin American audiovisual space (in which the USA plays a
significant, but not all-important, role) and a closer engagement with the rhythms of
international popular culture. But Pertierra also identifies a ‘retreat into privacy’ for those
Cubans with access to hard drives, as their media habits become further removed from
Notes 137
state media and they start to worry about the security of their valuable devices in their
homes. The key concern of Pertierra’s informants is not freedom of expression but ‘the
widening divide between those who have access to electronic media and those who do not’.
Hence, in the Cuban context, informal media provides mobility and freedom as well as
introducing new vectors of class difference into a political system founded on the basis of
economic equality. Anna Pertierra, Cuba: The Struggle for Consumption (Coconut Creek, FL:
Caribbean Studies Press, 2011). Citation is from a draft chapter kindly supplied by author.
42. Paul Haven, ‘Cuba Tries to Drag Shadow Economy into the Light’, Forbes.com, 5 July 2011,
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/07/05/general-cb-fea-cuba-the-secret-economy_
8549535.html
43. Rana Dasgupta, ‘Maximum Cities’, New Statesman, 27 March 2006, pp. 38–40.
44. Melanie Gilligan, ‘Slumsploitation: The Favela on Film and TV’, Mute, 5 September 2009,
http://www.metamute.org/en/Slumsploitation-Favela-on-Film-and-TV; Katia Maciel,
‘The Franchised Favela in Recent Brazilian Cinema’, paper delivered at the Transnational
Cinemas and Globalising Societies conference, Universidad Iberoamericana, Puebla, Mexico,
29 August 2008.
45. Augusto Cesar Freitas de Oliveira, ‘O filme do ano: observações periféricas sobre Tropa de
Elite’, Achegas.net – Revista de Ciência Política vol. 38 (2008), pp. 5–18. Quote translated
from Portuguese in collaboration with the author.
46. Alexei Barrioneuvo, ‘A Violent Police Unit, on Film and in Rio’s Streets’, New York Times,
14 October 2007, p. 3.
47. Sheila Johnson, ‘The Movie That Shook a Country’, Daily Telegraph (London), 18 July 2008,
p. 26.
48. LAN houses (high-speed internet cafés) are increasingly common around the country,
providing low-cost access to the internet despite the comparatively low level of household
penetration.
49. Barrioneuvo, ‘A Violent Police Unit’.
50. In February 2011, 150 police officers swept through the Camelódromo Uruguaiana in a
massive two-day anti-counterfeiting raid, the largest ever seen in Brazil. ‘Megaoperação
contra a pirataria fecha Camelódromo da Uruguaiana’, Jornal do Brasil, 26 January 2011,
http://www.jb.com.br/rio/noticias/2011/01/26/megaoperacao-contra-a-pirataria-fecha-
camelodromo-da-uruguaiana/. Thanks to Augusto Cesar de Oliveira for his insights into
informal markets in Brazil.
51. Michael Gibbons, ‘Dispatch from Brazil: Golden Bear Upset: A Look at the Controversy
Behind Tropa de Elite’, Indiewire, 26 February 2009, http://www.indiewire.com/article/
dispatch_from_brazil_golden_bear_upset_a_look_at_the_controversy_behind_tro. See
also de Oliviera, ‘O filme do ano’; David Tryhorn, ‘Playing Favela Fast and Loose’, Guardian,
16 September 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/15/worldcinema
4 NOLLYWOOD AT LARGE
1. Since it first appeared in a series of New York Times articles in 2002, the term ‘Nollywood’
has gained currency in the global news media as a nickname for the Nigerian video industry.
The term is used widely in Nigeria, though critics have rightly pointed out that the
Californicentricity of this term offers a distorted optic on an industry which has its own

logics, histories and dreams. For more on this debate, see Jonathan Haynes, ‘ “Nollywood”:
What’s in a Name?’, Film International vol. 5 no. 4 (2007), pp. 106–8; originally published in
Guardian (Nigeria), 3 July.
2. Joseph Gugler, African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2003), p. 177.
3. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, ‘Information Sheet No. 1: Analysis of the UIS International
Survey on Feature Film Statistics’, 2009, http://www.uis.unesco.org/template/pdf/cscl/
Infosheet_No1_cinema_EN.pdf. Note that a precise quantification of Nollywood’s output
and revenue is impossible, given the informal nature of the industry. Until recently the
website of Nigeria’s National Film and Video Censors Board (www.nfvcb.gov.ng) claimed to
have classified 1,588 films in 2007, the most recent year for which figures were available,
but its figures are not entirely reliable and many more films circulate without official
approval.
4. Onookome Okome, ‘Nollywood: Africa at the Movies’, Film International vol. 5 no. 4 (2007),
p. 4.
5. Early academic studies include: Jonathan Haynes, ‘Nigerian Cinema: Structural
Adjustments’, Research in African Literatures vol. 26 no. 3 (1995), pp. 97–119; Brian Larkin,
‘Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities’, Africa
vol. 67 no. 3 (1997), pp. 406–40; Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome, ‘Evolving
Popular Media: Nigerian Video Films’, Research in African Literatures vol. 29 no. 3 (1998),
pp. 106–28; Jonathan Haynes (ed.), Nigerian Video Films (Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press, 2000).
6. A recent edition of Journal of African Cultural Studies (vol. 22 no. 10, 2010), edited by
Lindiwe Dovey, stages a productive dialogue between African cinema studies and
scholarship on the video boom. See also Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen (eds), Viewing
African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010).
7. Haynes, ‘Nigerian Cinema: Structural Adjustments’, p. 97. The films coming out of the
Yoruba travelling theatre tradition (directed by Ogunde, Ade Love and others) were very
popular at the end of the 1970s and in the early 80s, with multiple weekly screening at the
National Theatre in Lagos and in the major Yoruba cities; but the overall level of
production was very low, with only a handful of 35mm and 16mm titles released each year.
8. Emmanuel Sama, ‘African Films are Foreigners in their Own Countries’, Ecrans d’Afrique
vol. 4 (1993), p. 54.
9. Gaston Kabore, ‘The African Cinema in Crisis’, UNESCO Courier July–August 1995,
pp. 70–3.
10. Haynes, Nigerian Video Films, p. xv.
11. Moradewun Adejunmobi, ‘English and the Audience of an African Popular Culture:
The Case of Nigerian Video Film’, Cultural Critique vol. 50 (2002), p. 78. Note that Igbos are
dominant in the English-language production sector and in distribution generally.
12. Examples include the Onitsha Market literature and the pulp romances (soyayya) common
in northern Nigeria. See Larkin, ‘Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers’.
13. John C. McCall, ‘The Pan-Africanism We Have: Nollywood’s Invention of Africa’, Film
International vol. 5 no. 4 (2007), p. 99.
14. VCD stands for video compact disc, a precursor to the DVD format which is still popular in
many African and Asian nations.
Notes 139
15. Brian Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of
Piracy’, Public Culture vol. 16 no. 2 (2004), p. 295.
16. 200 naira is the average price per disc, but films are typically split into at least two separate
parts (see following section).
17. Babson Ajibade, ‘From Lagos to Douala: Seeing Spaces and Popular Video Audiences’,
Postcolonial Text vol. 3 no. 2 (2007), p. 11.
18. Ibid.
19. McCall, ‘The Pan-Africanism We Have’, p. 96.
20. Chukwuma Okoye, ‘Looking at Ourselves in our Mirror: Agency, Counter-Discourse, and the
Nigerian Video Film’, Film International vol. 5 no. 4, p. 26.
21. Alessandro Jedlowski, ‘Beyond the Video Boom: New Tendencies in the Nigerian Video
Industry’, paper presented at ASAUK writing workshop, Birmingham, 16 April 2010. Thank
you to the author for illuminating conversations about the industry which have informed
my thinking about the formal–informal dynamic in relation to Nigerian video.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Justin Akpovi-Esade, ‘At Last, the Hologram Arrives’, Guardian (Nigeria), 4 December 2002,
p. 60. Thanks to Obafemi Lasode for the reference.
25. Jedlowski, ‘Beyond the Video Boom’.
26. There have been shoot-outs between police and pirates at Alaba. ‘NCC Impounds N.5billion
Pirated Works’, Daily Sun, 16 August 2006, p. 25.
27. Intellectual Property Watch, video interview with Charles Igwe, 12 March 2010,
http://vimeo.com/10111557
28. Afolabi Adesanya, ‘From Film to Video’, in Haynes, Nigerian Video Films, pp. 37–50.
29. An example of a popular 35mm Nollywood film is Teco Benson’s 2009 hit Mission to
Nowhere.
30. Jedlowski, ‘Beyond the Video Boom’, p. 16.
31. Larkin, ‘Degraded Images’, p. 297.
32. Larkin, ‘Hausa Dramas and the Rise of Video Culture in Nigeria’, in Haynes, Nigerian Video
Films, pp. 209–42.
33. John C. McCall, ‘Nollywood Confidential: The Unlikely Rise of Nigerian Video Film’,
Transition vol. 95 (2004) p. 101.
34. Moradewun Adejunmobi, ‘Nigerian Video Film as Minor Transnational Practice’,
Postcolonial Text vol. 3 no. 2 (2007), http://journals.sfu.ca/pocol/index.php/pct/article/
view/548/405
35. A recent trend has been cheap multi-pack DVDs, in which pirates compile up to twelve or
even twenty movies onto the one disc. Many producers complain that this is even more
damaging than regular piracy, driving down the perceived value of Nigerian movies in the
consumer’s mind.
36. Kareem Fahim, ‘Pirated Films from Nigeria Are Seized in Brooklyn’, New York Times,
1 November 2010, p. A30.
37. Karaganis, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, p. 25.
38. Email correspondence with Tony Kavukattu, director of operations, February 2008. Izogn
caters almost exclusively to diasporic Africans in nations with high levels of broadband
penetration, mostly in Europe, the USA and UK. While Izogn Movies has also recently
introduced a ‘low-bandwidth’ streaming option, there is very little traffic from African

nations. Update: as this book goes to press, the Izogn Movies website is offline and the
business appears to have ceased operations.
39. This recalls the ‘degraded’ nature of the pirate video circuits in northern Nigeria, as
described by Brian Larkin: ‘it was common to watch Indian films with advertisements
scrolling across the bottom of the screen announcing “Al Mansoor’s video” followed by a
long list of his many shops in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and other parts of the gulf, along with their
telephone, telex, and fax numbers. These videos often found their way to the Kano
television station, CTV, where announcements for Al Mansoor’s many video shops
sometimes obliterated the Arabic and English subtitles at the bottom of the screen.’ Larkin,
‘Degraded Images’, p. 296.
40. ‘Lights, Camera, Africa: Movies are Uniting a Disparate Continent, and Dividing it Too’,
The Economist, 16 December 2010, pp. 85–8.
41. Ibid. For other critiques, see Mawutodzi Abissath, ‘Film as a Force for National
Development’, Ecrans d’Afrique vol. 4 (1993), pp. 68–71; Frank Nwachukwu Ukadike, Black
African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Yusuf M. Adamu, ‘Between
the Word and the Screen: A Historical Perspective on the Hausa Literary Movement and the
Home Video Invasion’, Journal of African Cultural Studies vol. 15 no. 2 (2002), pp. 203–13.
42. Similar critiques have been levelled at the ‘imperialist’ effects of Hong Kong and Japanese
media, which have long dominated markets in East and South East Asia. The Taiwanese
scholar Dzing-Tann Lii has described Hong Kong as ‘a colonized empire’, arguing that its
film industry (in its heyday, at least) ‘not only resists foreign domination, but also “invades”
other countries, thereby creating a new type of imperialism’. Ding-Tzann Lii, ‘A Colonized
Empire: Reflections on the Expansion of Hong Kong Films in Asian Countries’, in Kuan-
Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 122–41. See also Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2002).
5 SIX FACES OF PIRACY
1. Linda Lee, ‘Bootleg Videos: Piracy with a Camcorder’, New York Times, July 1995, p. D1.
2. Motion Picture Association and Lek Consulting, The Cost of Movie Piracy (Los Angeles: MPA,
2008); Rand Corporation, Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism (Santa Monica: Rand
Corporation, 2009).
3. Motion Picture Association of America, ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, http://www.mpaa.
org/contentprotection/faq
4. Magz Osborne, ‘Pirates Find More Ways to Plunder’, Variety, 21 June 2003, p. 21.
5. Ronald V. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property
(Boulder, CA: Westview Press, 1996); Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of
Modern Intellectual Property Law: The British Experience, 1760–1911 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999); Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs:
The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York: New York
University Press, 2003); Simon Frith and Lee Marshall (eds), Music and Copyright
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big
Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York:
Penguin, 2004).
Notes 141
6. The USA was not a party to the Berne Convention until 1989. Berne’s moral rights (droit
d’auteur) provisions were not recognised by the USA – though some legal protections for
creators can be found in other areas of US law – and were phased out in the final version of
the GATT.
7. John Frow, ‘Public Domain and the New World Order in Knowledge’, Social Semiotics
vol. 10 no. 2 (2000), pp. 173–85.
8. Ibid., p. 182.
9. A plurilateral treaty is a type of multilateral treaty, where a limited number of states agree,
with very few reservations, on an issue. This can be compared with most multilateral
treaties, where there are generally more signatories but the scope of reservations is
greater.
10. Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs. Lucas, on record as a strong defender of IP
regimes, is still more lenient than some of his contemporaries when it comes to Star Wars
fan activity.
11. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2.
12. Ibid.; Nitin Govil, ‘War in the Age of Pirate Reproduction’, Sarai Reader 04 (2004),
pp. 378–83.
13. ‘Tipping Hollywood the Black Spot’, The Economist, 28 August 2003, pp. 43–4.
14. Kelly Gates, ‘Will Work For Copyrights: The Cultural Policy of Anti-Piracy Campaigns’, Social
Semiotics vol. 16 no. 1 (2006), pp. 57–73.
15. Ben Grubb, ‘Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen to Take Down Internet Pirates’, The Age
(Melbourne), 8 September 2010, http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-
news/film-industry-hires-cyber-hitmen-to-take-down-internet-pirates-20100907-
14ypv.html
16. Shujen Wang and Jonathan J. H. Zhu, ‘Mapping Film Piracy in China’, Theory, Culture and
Society vol. 20 no. 4 (2003), pp. 97–125.
17. Karaganis, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.
18. Majid Yar, ‘The Global “Epidemic” of Movie “Piracy”: Crime-Wave or Social Construction?’,
Media, Culture and Society vol. 27 no. 5 (2005), p. 690.
19. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture, pp. 103–6.
20. ‘Rip. Mix. Burn’, The Economist, 2 July 2005, pp. 13–14.
21. Adrian Johns, ‘Piracy as a Business Force’, Culture Machine vol. 10 (2009), pp. 44–63.
22. Ibid., p. 49.
23. Maggie Farley, ‘China Piracy Crackdown Targets US-Linked Firms’, LA Times, 25 April 1996,
p. 4.
24. Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Douglas Clark, ‘IP Rights Protection Will Improve in China –
Eventually’, The China Business Review May–June 2000, pp. 22–9.
25. Cheap Chinese VCD and DVD hardware is not entirely outside the established circuits of
transnational audiovisual industry capital, however, as chip and component patent licences
have to be leased from the likes of Time Warner, Hitachi, Sony and Philips. Wang, Framing
Piracy, pp. 51–3.
26. I first encountered the term ‘cockroach capitalism’ via Darrell Davis (‘Compact Generation:
VCD Markets in Asia’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 23 no. 2, [2003],
pp. 165–76), who credits Chuck Kleinhans as its source. The term was used in J. K.
Galbraith’s The New Industrial State (London: H. Hamilton, 1972). See also Scott Lash and

John Urry’s concept of ‘disorganised capitalism’, in The End of Organised Capitalism

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
27. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, p. 246; John Naughton, ‘How Sony Became an Ugly Sister’,
The Observer, 18 December 2005, p. 6.
28. Cited in Don Groves, ‘Video Piracy Kicks Back Into High Gear’, Variety, 9 September 2002,
p. 10.
29. Wired’s reputation has suffered since its involvement in the outing of officer Bradley
Manning as the source of the Wikileaks documents, but during the 1990s and 2000s it
played an important role in articulating an informal philosophy of informational freedom
for its early-adopter readers.
30. Vaidhyanthan, Copyright and Copywrongs. In later work Vaidhyanthan offers a different
critique of IP, one which is more self-reflexive and globally focused. See ‘The Anarchist in
the Coffee House: A Brief Consideration of Local Culture, the Free Culture Movement, and
Prospects for a Global Public Sphere’, Law and Contemporary Problems vol. 70 (2007),
pp. 205–10.
31. Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and The Anti-Capitalist Movement
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
32. Richard M. Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman
(Boston: Free Software Foundation, 2002); McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
33. See Lawrence Lessig’s books Free Culture, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World (New York: Random House, 2002) and Remix: Making Art and Commerce
Thrive in the New Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008).
34. Lessig, Free Culture, p. 199.
35. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009); Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
36. Lessig, Free Culture, p. 227.
37. Kavita Philip, ‘What is a Technological Author? The Pirate Function and Intellectual
Property’, Postcolonial Studies vol. 8 no. 2 (2005), pp. 199–218.
38. Lessig, Free Culture, p. xvi.
39. Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text (Glasgow: William Collins and Sons, 1977), p. 143.
40. Ibid., p. 142.
41. Ibid., p. 146.
42. Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc a b c’, in V. E. Taylor and C. E Winquist (eds), Postmodernism:
Critical Concepts (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 418–19.
43. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 3.
44. Steve Neale, Genre (London: BFI, 1980); Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2.
45. One example is the controversy surrounding the Larrikin Music Publishing Pty Ltd vs EMI
Songs Australia Pty Ltd case of 2010, in which the Australian band Men at Work were sued
by the rights-holder of a children’s folk song. For commentary, see Steve Collins,
‘Kookaburra v Down Under: It’s Just Overkill’, Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture vol. 7
no. 1 (2010), http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=145
46. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture. See also Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication
(London: Sage, 1995).
Notes 143
47. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, p. 5.

48. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture, p. 9.
49. Ibid., p. 210.
50. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, p. 226.
51. Ibid., p. 222.
52. Laikwan Pang, Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema
53. Pang, ‘Mediating the Ethics of Technology’, p. 9.
54. Kong Rithdee, ‘Scourge or Saviours? Film Pirates May Be Breaking the Law, Yet They Are
Also Providing an Indispensible Cultural Service’, Bangkok Post, 7 April 2006. For a
discussion of pirate cinephilia in the Philippines context, see Jasmine Nadua Trice, ‘The
Quiapo Cinémathèque: Transnational DVDs and Alternative Modernities in the Heart of
Manila’, International Journal of Cultural Studies vol. 13 no. 5 (2010), pp. 531–50.
55. Tilman Baumgärtel, ‘Media Piracy and Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia’, in Geert
Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to Youtube (Amsterdam:
Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), pp. 259–71.
56. This observation resonates with early studies of piracy, which highlighted its potential as a
driver of cultural imperialism. For example, Chesterman and Lipman, The Electronic Pirates.
57. Larkin, Signal and Noise.
58. Ravi Sundaram, ‘Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India’, Sarai Reader 01
(Delhi: Sarai, 2001), p. 95; Sundaram, Pirate Modernity.
59. Ravi Sundaram, ‘Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New Globalisation’, Economic and
Political Weekly (India), 3 January 2004, p. 96.
60. Ravi Sundaram, ‘Other Networks: Media Urbanism and the Culture of the Copy in South
Asia’, in Joe Karaganis (ed.), Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (New York: Social
Science Research Council, 2007), pp. 54–5.
61. Philip, ‘What is a Technological Author?’, p. 207.
62. Ibid., p. 210.
63. Lawrence Liang, ‘Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation’, Sarai Reader 05 (Delhi:
Sarai, 2005), p. 12.
64. Lawrence Liang, ‘Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethining Access to Culture’, SSRN
working paper, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1436229
65. Ibid., p. 4.
66. International Intellectual Property Alliance, Special 301 Recommendations, Mexico, 2008
(excerpt), p 55, http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2008/2008SPEC301MEXICO.pdf
67. ‘Pirated Goods: A Fake for Every Desire’, El Universal, 8 June 2005.
68. Alfonzo Hernández, ‘Tepito: The Transformaton of a Site of of Resistance’, paper given at
World Planning Schools Congress, Palacio de Minería, Mexico City, 2006,
http://www.barriodetepito.com.mx/detodo/organizaciones/congress_2006.html. For
studies of Tepito’s history and economy, see Natalia Grisales Ramírez, ‘“En Tepito todo se
vende menos la dignidad”: Espacio público e informalidad económica en el Barrio Bravo’,
Alteridades vol. 13 (2003), pp. 67–83; Pablo Piccato, ‘Communities and Crime in Mexico
City’, Delaware Review of Latin American Studies vol. 6 no. 1 (2005), http://www.udel.edu/
LAS/Vol6-1Piccato.html; Guillermina Grisel and Castro Nieto, ‘Intermediarismo político y
sector informal: El comercio ambulante en Tepito’, Nueva antropologia vol. 11 no. 37 (1990),
pp. 59–69; John Cross, Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); John Cross and Alfonso Morales, Street Entrepreneurs:
People, Place and Politics in Local and Global Perspective (London: Routledge, 2007); Sergio
Peña, ‘Regulating Informal Markets: Informal Commerce in Mexico City’, International
Journal of Sociology and Social Policy vol. 20 no. 9–10 (2000), pp. 37–67; Karaganis, Media
Piracy and Emerging Economies.
69. John Cross, ‘Pirateria callejero, el estado y la globalización’, paper given at Comércio,
culturas e políticas públicas em tempos de globalizaçao, Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janiero, Escola de Serviço Social, 2005.
70. The Economist, 10 March 2007.
71. Cited in Ken Bensinger, ‘Muscles in Mexico’, Daily Variety, 10 March 2005, p. 3.
72. International Intellectual Property Alliance, Special 301, pp. 52, 54. IIPA Special 301 reports
are annual updates on the worst piracy offenders. The 2008 report nominates thirteen
nations for special mention on the ‘Priority Watchlist’: Argentina, Egypt, India, Mexico, the
PRC, Peru, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine, Chile, Costa Rica and,
surprisingly, Canada (for its lack of legislative reform).
73. I was not able to verify this claim, but I have no reason to doubt it.
74. Both Cross (‘Pirateria callejero, el estado y la globalización’) and Peña (‘Regulating Informal
Markets’) note that political donations and other forms of support help to keep the Tepito
community on-side with PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and other Mexican political
parties.
75. Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds.
76. A pseudonym is used here.
6 THE GREY INTERNET
1. Motion Picture Association of America, ‘Response to Request for Public Comment on the
2010 Special 301 Out of Cycle Review of Notorious Markets’, 5 November 2010. Further
analysis of this shift is provided in Karaganis, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.
2. Thank you to Julian Thomas for this insight.
3. Movielink recently ceased operating as a standalone website and has been absorbed into
Blockbuster.com. Rafat Ali, ‘Movielink-Blockbuster Deal: Cash $6.6M; BB Paid Netflix $7M
For Patent Dispute’, Forbes, 14 July 2008, http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/14/movielink-
blockbuster-netflix-tech-cx_pco_0814paidcontent.html; ‘Hollywood and the Internet:
Coming Soon’, The Economist, 23 February 2008, pp. 86–8.
4. As Andrew Currah noted in 2004, adult content has been crucial for CinemaNow: ‘The
margins on pay-per-view adult titles are much higher than non-adult titles: adult content
has a higher price point and only 20 per cent of the gross revenue is returned to the
distributor (compared to 60–65 per cent on a lower priced studio title)’. Andrew Currah, The
Digital Storm: The Strategic Challenge of Internet Distribution to the Hollywood Studio System
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 66.
5. Apple Trumps Sony, Wal-Mart in Online Film Download War’, The Independent, 9 February
2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/apple-trumps-sony-
walmart-in-online-film-download-war-2208827.html. Note that Apple has a significant
commercial advantage over the other businesses, as it can cross-subsidise iTunes from the
profits generated by sales of its devices. Many competitors claim that iTunes deliberately
Notes 145
undercuts them on prices for digital content as a way of adding value to its US$700 iPhones
and iPads (the source of Apple’s real profits).
6. Virginia Heffernan, ‘The Death of the Open Web’, New York Times Magazine, 17 May 2010,
p. 16; see also Jonathan Zittrain’s discussion of tethered devices in The Future of the
Internet.
7. In the USA, Netflix is a mail-order DVD rental and online streaming service. In Canada, it is
streaming-only.
8. Sandvine Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report (Ontario: Sandvine Intelligent
Broadband Networks, 2010), p. 2.
9. This depends on the number of ‘seeders’. Popular content that is being shared by thousands
of users simultaneously will download at lightning speed; more obscure content that is
being shared by only a few users will take days to download.
10. For example, Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms
Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
11. Movieslinks.tv has been taken offline by US authorities; but other sites have cropped up in
its place. There have been at least nine court cases brought against such sites by the
Hollywood studios. However, the fundamental question of whether linking to pirated
content is illegal remains unresolved. See ‘The War Against Movies and TV Show Linking
Websites’, TorrentFreak, 10 September 2010, http://torrentfreak.com/the-war-against-
movie-and-tv-show-linking-websites-100910; Jason J. Lunardi, ‘Guerrilla Video: Potential
Copyright Liability for Websites That Index Links to Unauthorized Streaming Content’,
Fordham Intellectual Property Media & Entertainment Law Journal vol. 19 (2009),
pp. 1077–129.
12. ‘Piracy on Fast Forward’, Law.com, 7 September 2007, http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/
PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1189069353022
13. Mark Sweney, ‘Google Ramps Up Anti-Piracy Measures’, Guardian, 2 December 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/02/google-piracy-illegal-downloads
14. A quick anecdote about RuTube: one rainy Sunday afternoon, I was enjoying a British
World War II documentary featuring extensive footage of the Eastern front. The
documentary is not available legally online but of course the informal economy
provided a workaround: a Google Video search led me to episodes scattered across a
number of different sites, including Trilulilu, Veoh, Google Video, YouTube and
RuTube, all apparently uploaded by users in violation of copyright. RuTube was one of
the better sites, with a higher-quality image and less freezing than the others, so I spent
a few hours there watching episodes of this venerable doco. The price one pays for the
free RuTube experience is exposure to advertising in between episodes. This resulted in
some jarring spectarorial experiences. One minute I was watching black-and-white
footage of starving comrades on the frontlines in the 1940s, then the clip would finish
abruptly and RuTube would automatically load an ad for a Russian mobile phone
provider featuring glamorous Muscovites playing with their iPhones, thus catapulting
me into the post-Soviet turbo-capitalist present. Seconds later, I was back on the World
War II Russian front; then at the next ad break I would be snapped back to the present
with an incomprehensible commercial for laundry liquid, featuring a handsome Slavic
couple in a trendy condominium. The sudden jump between historical periods – not to
mention economic systems – was disconcerting to say the least. But I enjoyed these
Russian ads almost as much as the documentary itself, and from now on my memories

of the battle of Stalingrad will forever be peppered with the visual totems of post-Soviet
capitalism.
15. Noah Shahchtman, ‘Hamas’ YouTube Ripoff, Dead Again’, Wired, 24 October 2008,
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/10/hamas-youtube-r; Claire Hoffman, ‘Obscene
Losses’, Portfolio, 15 October 2007, http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-
inc/arts/2007/10/15/YouPorn-Vivid-Entertainment-Profile/
16. This is specified in the ‘Safe Harbor’ provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
17. For an overview of the controversy, see Tim Arango, ‘As Rights Clash on YouTube, Some
Music Vanishes’, New York Times, 22 March 2009, p. B1.
18. Sean Cubitt, ‘Distribution and Media Flows’, Cultural Politics vol. 1. no. 2 (2005), p. 202.
19. ‘Viacom International, Inc., Comedy Partners, Country Music Television, Inc, Paramount
Pictures Corporation, and Black Entertainment Tellevision LLC v. YouTube, Inc., YouTube,
LLC, and Google Inc.’, US District Court for the Southern District of New York, 2007–10,
http://news.cnet.com/pdf/ne/2007/ViacomYouTubeComplaint3-12-07.pdf. Viacom sought
damages for content uploaded to YouTube prior to the introduction of the Content ID system.
20. Ibid.
21. ‘Broadcast Yourself’, Broadcasting Ourselves ;) – The Official YouTube Blog, 18 March 2010,
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadcast-yourself.html
22. Documents submitted to the court can be accessed at http://www.google.com/press/
youtube_viacom_documents.html. For analysis, see Cory Doctorow, ‘Viacom v. YouTube
is a Microcosm of the Entertainment Industry’, Guardian, 4 May 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/04/viacom-youtube
23. The future of YouTube’s movie delivery services is unclear. In 2010 it experimented with
paid downloads, offering five independent Sundance movies for streaming at a price of
$3.99 each. At this stage YouTube/Google seems happy to stick to the free streaming model,
combined with monetisation policies for rights-holders, rather than to try and compete
with Netflix and the other paid/subscription online video services. At the time of writing,
Facebook has started experimenting with paid movie downloads as well.
24. Elaine Jing Zhao, ‘Online Video Distribution: China’, unpublished report, Queensland
University of Technology, 2010.
25. Randall Stross, ‘Will Books Be Napsterized?’, New York Times, 4 October 2009, p. BU1.
26. Enigmax, ‘The Mega-Money World of Mega-Upload’, TorrentFreak, 6 June 2010,
http://torrentfreak.com/the-mega-money-world-of-megaupload-100606
27. Motion Picture Association, ‘Response to Request for Public Comment on the 2010 Special
301 Out of Cycle Review of Notorious Markets’, pp. 5–6.
28. These remarks draw on Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas, ‘The Business of Anti-Piracy:
New Zones of Enterprise in the Copyright Wars’, forthcoming in International Journal of
Communication.
29. Ben Grubb, ‘Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen to Take Down Internet Pirates’, The Sydney
Morning Herald, 8 September 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-
14ypv.html; Anick Jesdanun, ‘Small Companies Legally Thrive on Internet Piracy’,
Information Week, 8 July 2003, http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/
showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10818445
30. Mark Ishikawa from the controversial anti-piracy agency BayTSP is a former hacker. For
another example, see David Kravets, ‘Exclusive: I Was a Hacker for the MPAA’, Wired,
Notes 147
22 October 2007, http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/10/

p2p_hacker?currentPage=2
31. The rights-management company DigiProtect launched some of the first speculative
invoicing lawsuits in Germany. In the UK, the (now-defunct) firm ACS:Law has been the
driving force behind these suits. In Singapore, a similar action was launched on behalf of the
anime distributor Odex by the anti-piracy group BayTSP. The US cases are discussed here.
32. Eriq Gardner, ‘New Litigation Campaign Quietly Targets Tens of Thousands of Movie
Downloaders’, The Hollywood Reporter, THR Esq blog, 30 Mar 2010, http://thresq.
hollywoodreporter.com/2010/03/new-litigation-campaign-targets-tens-of-thousands-of-
bittorrent-users.html
33. Matthew J. Schwartz, ‘Mass P2P Lawsuits Targeted Nearly 100,000 Last Year’, Information
Week, 7 February 2011, http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/policy/
34. The US Copyright Group is a front for the Virginia law firm Dunlap Grubb & Weaver. Copies
of the settlement letters can be viewed at http://news.cnet.com/2300-1023_3-10003610-
7.html
35. The reluctance of ISPs to cooperate with mass lawsuits is posing the biggest problem yet for
companies like US Copyright Group. Greg Sandoval, ‘Hurt Locker Lawyers Continue Anti-
Piracy Fight’, Cnet, 4 January 2011, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20027252-
261.html
36. Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds’.
CONCLUSION
1. See note 26, Chapter 5.

2. Geert Lovink, ‘The Art of Watching Databases’, in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube
(Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), pp. 9–12.
3. Mark Pesce, ‘Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century’, The Human
Network blog, 31 January 2008, http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/2008/01/31/
unevenly-distributedproduction-models-for-the-21st-century/
4. Henry Jenkins, ‘Spreadable Media: Creating Media and Value in a Networked World’, video
presentation, Screen Futures conference, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 12 July
2011. For more on spreadable media, see various texts by Henry Jenkins, including posts on
his blog Confessions of an Aca-Fan (especially http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/
if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html), and his forthcoming book Spreadable Media,
co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green.
5. Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet is a passionate polemic against DRM-enabled media
platforms (especially those produced by Apple) which seek to turn the free and open
networks of the internet into private shopping malls.
6. For more on this point, see Lawrence Liang, ‘Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure:
Rethinking Access to Culture’, SSRN Working Paper, 2009, http://ssrn.com/paper=1436229
7. Jodi Dean, ‘Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics’,
in Megan Boler (ed.), Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2008), pp. 101–21.

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Lobato Index 3/1/12 2:41 pm Page 163
Index
10BA tax scheme 30 Anytime 98 Beta video format 22, 89

8mm film format 89 Apple 98 see also iTunes ‘Betamax case’ (1984 Sony
16mm film format 6, 13, 19, AqsaTube 102 Corp vs Universal City
56, 89 Arab Spring 113 Studios) 72–3, 75, 81
20th Century-Fox 11, 23 archiving 34–5, 88 BigPond Movies 97
35mm film format 11, 56, 61 Association of Movie BitTorrent 6, 96, 97, 99,
Producers (Nigeria) 60 100, 104, 105, 106,
A Trip to the Moon 14 The Asylum 25, 35 112
action cinema 24–32 see also Atlantic Releasing 23 Black Caesar (1973) 28
genre audiences 5, 6, 51, 59 Black Cobra (Cobra Nero)
ACS:Law 108 audience measurement series (1987–91) 28–9
Afghanistan 47 12–13 black market 14
Afman, Frans J. 27 Australia vii, 28, 30–2, 41, blaxploitation see genre
Africa Magic 65 71, 73, 97 Blockbuster 35, 45, 97 see
Aiplex 106–7 Avco Embassy 23 also video stores
Al Qaeda 73 AVH: Alien vs Hunter (2007) Blood for Tears series 62
Alaba International Market 25 Bloom, Noel 23
61 Bolivia 16–17
Amazon.com 60 B film 5, 9, 15, 23–4, 26, 28, Boll, Uwe 108
Amazon Instant Video 97 30, 34, 44 Bollywood 18, 56, 57 see also
American Film Institute 33 Ba-k.com 105 India
American International Balogun, Ola 56 box-office revenue 12–13,
Pictures (AIP) see Bangkok International Film 51, 55
Corman, Roger, Festival 83 Braveworld 31
Filmways/AIP Barthes, Roland 78 Brazil 39, 49–52
American Pie (1999) 25 BBC (British Broadcasting Bring It On (2000) 25
Anderson, Chris 35 see also Corporation) 74 British Film Institute 33
long tail Beijing Bastards (1993) 47 Bronson, Charles 27
The Anna-Nicole Show (2002) Benin 58, 63 Bulgaria 31
26 Benkler, Yochai 77 Buñuel, Luis 89
anthropology 5, 16, 39–41 Berne Convention for the
anti-capitalism 80–2 Protection of Literary and Cable and Satellite
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Artistic Works 71 Broadcasting Association
Agreement (ACTA) 71 Best Buy 97–8 of Asia 69
Index 163
cable television 22, 39, 46, Creative Commons 113 Domitilla (1997) 61
65 Credit Lyonnais 27 download-to-own 97
Cameron, Kirk 9 crime fiction 32–2 Dracula (1992) 16
Cameroon 45, 58, 63 Cuba 26, 48 drive-ins 44
Canada 24–5, 28, 31 cult cinema 19 drugs 41, 46, 49, 52, 69, 85,
Cannes Film Festival 27 cultural capital 16, 79, 115 89
Cannon 23, 27–8, 34 cultural imperialism 28, 56, Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel
canons 33 66, 81 (1992) 26
Carolco 23 cultural politics 14–19 Drunken Master II (1994) 15
A Case of Honor (1991) 30 culture jamming 76
censorship 16, 43, 47, 52 cyberlockers 95–6, 97, 104–6 East Palace, West Palace
Chad 58, 63 (1996) 47
Chan, Jackie 15, 73 The Da Vinci Treasure (2006) Eastern Films Management
China 47, 55, 69, 75, 100, 25 31
102, 104 The Daily Show economic informality see
Christian film 9, 44, 88 (1996–present) 103 especially 39–52, 59–66
Cineclick 98 Dailymotion 96, 102, 112 Ejiro, Zeb 61
Cinemanow 97 Dangerous Guy (1994) see Ekeinde, Omotola Jalade 55
Cissé, Souleymane 56 Drunken Master II Electronic Frontier
City of God (2002) 49 De Laurentiis, Dino 23, 27 Foundation 76, 107–8
class 46, 66 de Soto, Hernando 40 Elite Squad see Tropa de elite
Clickstar 98 The Dead Pool (1988) 28 enforcement (intellectual
Cloud Ten Pictures 9 Deadly Affair (1995) 57 property) 12, 59–66,
Coalition of Nollywood Death Wish (1974) 27 69–72, 91–2, 106–8
Guilds and Associations Delta Force 2: The Columbian erotic thrillers see genre
60 Connection (1990) 28 espionage 42
Coase, Ronald 74 Democratic Republic of Evil Angels/A Cry in the Dark
Cobra (1986) 28 Congo 66 (1988) 28
‘cockroach capitalism’ 75, Demonstone 30 The Expendables (2010) 108
111 deregulation 74–6 exploitation film see genre,
Cold War 114 Derrida, Jacques 78–9 see also stag film
The Colour of Pomegranates Desperate Housewives
(1968) 47 (2004–present) 101 Facebook 112, 113
Columbia Pictures 75 diasporas 43, 55, 56, 63–5 Family Home Entertainment
Comedy Central 103 Dickens, Charles 72 23
Confessor, Rod 31 Die Hard (1988) 28 Farina, Dennis 26
Content ID system 102 digital downloads 11, 97 The Fatal Image (1990) 26
Coppola, Francis Ford 16 Digital Millennium Copyright favelas 49–52
copy protection 75 Act 72 file-hosting websites see
copyright 6, 67, 69–92, 96, direct-to-video see straight- cyberlockers
102, 106–9 to-video file sharing 51–2 see also
Corman, Roger 18, 24, 31 Disney 23 peer-to-peer, BitTorrent,
The Corpse Had a Familiar Dirty Harry (1971) 28 The Pirate Bay
Face (1994) 26 distraction 45 Film and Video Producers
corruption 90–2 distributed denial of service and Marketers
Crary, Jonathan 45 (DDOS) attacks 73, 106 Association of Nigeria 60

film clubs 14 Glover, Danny 63 informational freedom

film councils 14 Golan, Menahem 27, 34 114–17
Film-makers Association of Google 96, 101, 102, 103, Institute for Economic
Nigeria 64 106, 112 Affairs (United Kingdom)
film societies 14 Greece 71 74
film studies 1–2, 33, 45–6 Greencine 98 intellectual property (IP)
FilmDallas 23 11–12, 70–1, 80–1, 96 see
Filmways/AIP 23 Hamas 73 also copyright
Flight of Fury (2007) 25 hard drives 48 International Film
Footloose (1984) 47 Harry Potter series (2001–11) Management 30–2
formalisation 11, 41, 59–67, 89 International Intellectual
78, 80, 102–3 Hart, Keith 40 Property Alliance (IIPA)
Foucault, Michel 78 Hausa films 57, 58, 63 88
Fox, Vincente 87 Hemdale 23, 31 International Labour Office
France 29, 55, 102, 105 Hemmings, David 31 40
Franklin, Richard 30 Hezbollah 73 International Video
Free Trade Agreements Highlight 31 Entertainment 23
(FTAs) 71, 80 HMV 65 internet 11, 45, 48, 51–2,
Hollywood 3, 9, 11–13, 14, 65, 76, 82, 89, 95–109,
Gaddafi, Muammar 41 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 36, 111–17 see also Anytime,
Gaddafi, Saadi 41 41, 43, 44, 50, 52, 55, 56, BigPond Movies,
game consoles 98 58, 61, 72–3, 75, 81, 88, BitTorrent, Cinemanow,
General Agreement on 96, 99, 100; New Cineclix, Clickstar,
Tarrifs and Trade (GATT) Hollywood 23 cyberlockers,
71, 80 home video 21, 22, 23, 36 Dailymotion, Facebook,
genre 23–4, 25, 26, 28–9, 30, Hong Kong 15, 27, 28, 29, file sharing, Flickr,
32, 33, 57, 79–80, 95 56, 73, 76, 82 Google, Google+,
action 21, 28–9, 30, 57; horror film see genre Greencine, Hotfile, IFilm,
blaxploitation 23, 28; Hotfile 104 Jalipo, linking sites,
boxing films 88; drama human geography 39 Mediafire, MediaMarkt,
28, 57; erotic thrillers human rights 47 Mediatrip, Megaupload,
21, 23, 25; exploitation The Hurt Locker (2008) 108 Megavideo, Movielink,
films 19, 23–4, 30–2, 48, Huston, John 72 Napster, Orkut, peer-to-
49; horror 19, 23, 29; peer networks, The Pirate
martial arts films 15, 25, IFilm 98 Bay, Pop, Rapidshare,
29, 88; melodrama 26, IFM World Releasing Inc. Reeltime, RenRen,
56; mockbusters 25, 35; 30–2 Spotify, Spotflix,
science fiction 30, Igbo films 58 streaming video, TopFile,
superhero films 28, 88; Imanjaya, Ekky 19 Twitter, video-hosting
war films 28, 30 Imcine 89 sites, Vizumi, Vongo,
Germany 55, 97, 107 IMDB.com 33 YouSendIt, YouTube
Ghana 57, 58, 63, 66 In the Realm of the Senses iPod 98
Ginnane, Antony I., 30–2 (1976) 16 Iran 18, 36, 47
Glamour Girls (1994) 57 India 15, 44, 55, 58, 73, 106 Irish Republican Army (IRA)
globalisation 31, 51, 63, 87, Indonesia 19 73
114 Infernal Affairs (2002) 16 Island Alive 23
Index 165
Italy 28–9, 71 Macrovision 75 MTV 103

iTools 104 made-for-TV movies 26 Mubi 97
iTunes 60, 96, 97, 98, 99 Magnum Entertainment 23 Mui, Anita 73
Izogn Movies 65 Maguindanao Massacre multiplexes see cinemas
11/23/09 48, 108 music 47, 64, 71, 105
Jalipo 98 Malcolm X 115 music video vii, 48, 102
Japan 22, 55 Malcolm X (1992) 69 Mystics in Bali (1981) 19
JC Films 89 Manhunter (1986) 26
Jenkins, Henry 113–14 marketing 44 Napster 6, 100, 106
martial arts film see genre narcotraficante films 22, 41,
Karaganis, Joe 64 mass P2P lawsuits 106–9 89
Kenya 40 Marxism 40, 80–3 National Film and Video
Kill Bill (2003/4) 81 MCEG 23 Censors Board (Nigeria)
Kino.to 100 measurement 12–13 60
Kitano, Takeshi 36 media archaeology 18 neo-liberalism 41, 42, 87,
Media Defender see Peer 90
L’Harmattan TV 98 Media Technologies Netflix 65, 96, 98–9
La Paz 16–17 Media Home Entertainment New International Division
Lady Terminator (1989) 19 23 of Cultural Labour 29
Lagos 1, 61, 63 Mediafire 96 New Line Cinema 22, 23
Lai, Leon 73 MediaMarkt 97–8 New World 23, 31
laissez-faire 74–7 Mediatrip 98 Nielsen 12, 44
Lashka-e-Toiba 73 mediocrity 34 Niger 63
Lau, Andrew 16 Megarotic 104 Nigeria 5, 22, 55–67, 73, 83
Lee, Spike 69 Megaupload 104, 105 Nigerian Copyright
Left Behind trilogy 9, 13, 19 Megavideo 96 Commission 60
see also Christian film melodrama see genre Nigerian video industry see
legal studies 82 Mercenary for Justice (2006) Nollywood
Lessig, Lawrence 76, 80, 115 25 Nintendo Wii 98
Liang, Lawrence 84–5 Metacafe 102 Nnaji, Genevieve 55
libertarianism 70, 84, Metallica 72 Nnebue, Kenneth 56
115–16 Mexico 22, 24, 31, 41, 105 Nollywood 5, 55–67 see also
Liberty 31 Mexico City 1, 6, 70 see also Nigeria
Lightning Video 23 Tepito market Nollywood Foundation 63
Lii, Ding-Tzann 28 Miramax 23 Nollywood Movies (television
linking sites 96, 97, 100–1 MGM 23 channel) 65
Lionsgate 97 ‘mockbusters’ see genre Norris, Chuck 26
Lithuania 31 Modern Family Nosferatu (1922) 98
Liveleak 102 (2009–present) 101 Nouah, Ramsey 55
Living in Bondage (1992) 56 Monterey Home Video 23 Nu Art 14
long tail 35–6 Moretti, Franco 32–3, 35 Nu Image 108
Lorimar 23 Motion Picture Association nuclear plants 48
Los fauyqueros de Tepito of America (MPAA) 69,
(1982) 89 72, 75, 80, 87, 96, 100 offshore production 30–2,
Lovefilm 65, 98 Movielink 97–8 41–2
Lucas, George 72 MoviesLinks.tv 100 Ogunde, Hubert 56

Okoye, Chukwuma 59, 62 The Queen of Black Magic South Africa 45

Ong, Marilyn 31 (1983) 19 South Korea 71, 105
Orion 23 South Park (1997–present)
Ôshima, Nagisa 16 Race for the Yankee Zephyr 103
Osuofia in London (2003) 63 (1981) 31 speculative invoicing 107–8
OVA (original video raids see enforcement Spiderman 102
animation) 22 Rapidshare 96, 104–5 Spider-Man 3 (2007) 45, 50
region coding 75 Spotflix 98
Pacific Cine Films 14 regulation 4, 11, 14–16 Spotify 105
Parajanov, Sergei 47 Rentrak 44 stag film 6, 14 see also
Paramount 23, 97, 103 Roku 98 pornography
Peer Media Technologies Romania 24, 25, 102 star system 21, 25, 55–6
107 Rolling Stones 71 Statute of Anne 71
peer-to-peer networks 3, 45, Rothrock, Cynthia 25 straight-to-video 5, 9, 19,
97, 99, 105, 107 see also Runs–Zones–Clearances 21–36, 39, 44, 55, 90, 98
file sharing, BitTorrent, system 11 streaming video 63, 96,
The Pirate Bay Russia 48, 69, 102 97–8, 113
People’s Republic of China see RuTube 102 Street Crimes/Dead Even
China (1992) 26
Philippines 24, 28, 31, 32, 48 Safe Harbor 96, 102 street markets 49–52, 57,
Pickpocket (1998) 47 San Francisco 41 59, 61, 69, 76, 85–92
piracy 1, 6, 14, 16, 42, 43, Santa (1932) 88 studio era see Hollywood
49–52, 69–92, 106–9; as Santo (Mexican film series) Sudan 58, 63
access 82–5; as 88 Sundaram, Ravi 39, 83
authorship 78–80; as satellite TV 65, 69 Switzerland 104
free enterprise 74–6; as Savage Justice (1988) 30
free speech 76–7; as Seagal, Steven 25, 26 Taliban 47
theft 72–4; handicam Seinfeld (1994–98) 102 Tanzania 66
bootlegs 18 Sembène, Ousmane 56 taxation 28, 30, 40, 42, 43
The Pirate Bay 106 sequels 25 TED.com 113
pirate markets 6, 19, 47, 48, Serbia 27 television 11, 22, 43, 47, 48,
49–52, 57, 58, 59, 95 see set-top boxes 98 63, 65, 89, 102, 103 see
also Tepito market The Siege of Firebase Gloria also cable television
Pirate Modernity 83 (1989) 30 television studies 2, 12
Playstation 98 Sightsound 98 Telstra 97
pornography 14, 23, 24, 25, The Simpsons 9 Tepito market (Mexico) 70,
26, 88, 101, 102, 108, Singapore 45, 107 85–92
109 Sita Sings the Blues (2008) 113 The Terminators (2009) 35
postcolonialism 82 Skyscraper (1996) 26 Thailand 24, 69, 83
postmodernism 78 Slumdog Millionaire (2008) Thief (1981) 26
poststructuralism 78 49 Three the Hard Way (1974)
Poverty Row studios 25 Smedley, Oliver 74 28
Prism Entertainment 23 Smith, Anna-Nicole 26 ThrillerVideo 23
Prohibition 41 Snakes on a Train (2006) 25 Time magazine 112
psychoanalysis 45 Sony 23, 75, 97, 106 see also Titanic (1997) 47
public domain 71–2, 98 ‘Betamax case’ TiVo see set-top boxes
Index 167
To The Limit (1995) 26 V-cinema 22 The Who 71

Togo 63 Valenti, Jack 72 Wikileaks 113
TopFile 96 VCR 14, 22, 47, 58, 72 Williamson, Fred 28
Transmorphers (2007) 25 Veoh 102 windowing 11–12, 43 see also
transnational production Vestron 23, 31 Hollywood
28–32 VHS video format 19, 21, 22, Wired magazine 76, 113
Trenchard-Smith, Brian 30 57, 83, 89 see also home World Trade Organisation
Trilulilu 102 video (WTO) 71, 75, 80
Trimark 97 Viacom 103
TRIPS (Agreement on Trade- Video Club Owners X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Related Aspects of Association of Nigeria 60 (2009) 45
Intellectual Property video clubs 1, 46, 58–9, 60 Xbox 360 see gaming
Rights) 71 video-hosting sites 101–4 consoles
Tropa de elite (Elite Squad) video-on-demand 96–9 Xianke 75
(2007) 39, 49–52 video stores 6, 27, 35, 39,
Tsotsi (2005) 49 45, 97–8 yielding 28
Tudou 102, 104 Vidmark 23 Yoruba 58, 63
TVDuck 100 Vimeo 102 Youku 102, 104
Twitter 112, 113 Virgins from Hell (1987) 19 YouPorn 102
YouSendIt 105
Ukraine 31 Walmart Moviecentre 97 YouTube 96, 102, 103, 112,
UNESCO 55 Warner Bros. 75, 97 113
Universal Studios 23, 97 Web Sheriff 107 Yuan, Zhang 47
urban studies 5, 39 Weintraub Entertainment
Usai, Paolo Cherchi 34–5 Group 23 Zhangke, Jia 47

Shadow Economies of Cinema cover 13mm spine_13mm spine 09/01/2012 12:10 Page 1
How do people
access movies today?
What are the most
popular and powerful Shadow
Shadow Economies of Cinema

channels for media
distribution on Economies
a global scale?
How are film industries
book shows how they constitute a central
rather than marginal part of audiovisual culture of Cinema
and commerce.
changing in the face
Combining film industry analysis with cultural
of media convergence theory, Shadow Economies of Cinema opens up
and digitisation? a new area of inquiry for cinema studies,
putting industry research into dialogue with
wider debates about economic informality
To answer questions such as these, argues and commodity circulation. Written in an
Ramon Lobato, we must shift our gaze away accessible style, this book offers an original
from the legal film business and toward ‘bottom-up’ perspective on the global cinema
cinema’s shadow economies. All around the industry for researchers and students in film
world, films are bought from roadside stalls, studies, cultural studies, and media and
local markets, and grocery stores; they are communications.
illegally downloaded and streamed; they are
watched in makeshift video clubs, on street RAMON LOBATO is a research fellow at
corners, and in restaurants, shops and bars. the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Mapping Informal
Ramon Lobato
International film culture in its actually- Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne,
existing forms is a messy affair, and it relies
to a great extent on black and grey media
Australia.
Film Distribution
markets. Examining the industrial dynamics C U LT U R A L H I S TO R I E S O F C I N E M A
of these subterranean film networks across Series Editors: Lee Grieveson, University
a number of different sites – from Los Angeles College London, and Haidee Wasson, Concordia
to Lagos, Melbourne to Mexico City – this University.
Ramon Lobato
Printed in China

cover design: keenan

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Shadow Economies of Cinema cover 13mm spine_13mm spine 09/01/2012 12:10 Page 1

Shadow Economies of Cinema

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

CULTURAL HISTORIES OF CINEMA

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

© Ramon Lobato 2012

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be

First published in 2012 by

BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered

Cover design: keenan

Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978–1–84457–411–7 (pb)

5 Six Faces of Piracy . . . 69

This book is dedicated to my family: Jenny, Angelo and Julian Lobato.

viii Shadow Economies of Cinema

2 Shadow Economies of Cinema

Pirate DVD vending in Mexico City (Livia Radwanski)

FORMAL AND INFORMAL FILM ECONOMIES

Consequently, this is not a book about dominant vs marginal cinemas, the

SHADOWS, SITES AND CIRCUITS

4 Shadow Economies of Cinema

6 Shadow Economies of Cinema

Distribution from Above and Below 9

REDEFINING DISTRIBUTION: THEORY AND PRACTICE

10 Shadow Economies of Cinema

exhibition/consumption, involving the sale, reproduction, delivery, translation,

Distribution from Above and Below 11

Ang is pointing here to the epistemological dimensions of distribution practice. In her

12 Shadow Economies of Cinema

DISTRIBUTION FROM BELOW

Distribution from Above and Below 13

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DISTRIBUTION

14 Shadow Economies of Cinema

1. Distribution is about the transmission of values, competencies and ideology. It is a

Distribution from Above and Below 15

16 Shadow Economies of Cinema

As gatekeepers to circulating commodities, distributors distribute local differences by

Distribution from Above and Below 17

18 Shadow Economies of Cinema

Distribution from Above and Below 19

The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse 21

industries. In this sense, straight-to-video has strongly informal features. My focus in

‘ANYTHING WITH SPROCKET HOLES’

22 Shadow Economies of Cinema

Table 2.1 Structure of the US video economy, 1980s–90s

The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse 23

THE STV AESTHETIC

24 Shadow Economies of Cinema

The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse 25

TRANSNATIONAL STV CIRCUITS

At first glance, the global STV market seems to be as thoroughly dominated by

26 Shadow Economies of Cinema

The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse 27

otherwise. These flat-fee payments precluded the possibility of the producers

28 Shadow Economies of Cinema

The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse 29

SHOOTING AND SELLING STV ACTION IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC

International Film Management was a production company headed by the Australian

30 Shadow Economies of Cinema

The Straight-to-video Slaughterhouse 31

THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF CINEMA