Aaargh!

The first time I visited Bali in the early 1980s, I was struck by many things that still bring me back today. The smiles, the easy going nature of the Balinese, the greenery (hard to imagine Kuta as green now), the food and the solitude.

Other things I remember, have evolved differently (not always for the better), like mass tourism, explosion of resorts and the entrepreneurs of the copy world.

I was amazed at the first cassette store I entered in those days. For those born after Apple, cassettes were a technological marvel of transporting music via plastic cases with magnetic tape and were almost the death of the vinyl record but that’s another story. I was gob smacked by the prices and couldn’t resist loading up on music that had been outside my budget and even my tastes. $1 for a product that at the time was costing me $29 at home, overrode all emotions of proprietary license and intellectual property.

This hunger for the copy bargain, spread throughout Asia quickly and I spent many a year being a fashion folly in copied Polo and Lacoste shirts, while casually pushing up my shirt sleeve to reveal the latest Rolex or was that Rolecs ? The Gucchi bags, the Louise Vouton luggage and the Hughgo Boss shirts with their mangled English still attract the crowds today.

We’ve all seen the ads for pirated products and what it does to the supply chain and the producers. Yet the copy stores flourish and expand like mushrooms (something else I remember from Bali, no I don’t) with no outrage from the average tourist. It’s hard to come at the gripes of multinational record and movie companies, who have more money than God but want you to continue to buy the overpriced CD or DVD.

I don’t know any pirates personally, unless you count the occasional mate who copies a song or brings home a copied DVD for Saturday night pizzas? And it’s not only tourists that have taken to the pirate mind, 95% of all music downloaded globally last year, wasn’t paid for.

So what is it that allows our normally ethical and moral understanding to override all the notices?

The reasoning behind the piracy thinking from a tourist’s viewpoint, is we haven’t taken something you own but rather reproduced something you own. So the thinking is you have not suffered a direct loss, just a lesser gain. It’s a fine line but one that obviously works around the moral high ground we normally inhabit.

Also it’s hard to bypass a bargain on holidays.

So is $2.5 billion enough for Avatar and are we going to see a pirated copy in everyone’s home? Or will we have to wait for the pirated 3D glasses?

Is that a parrot on your shoulder?