Bollywood concerned about piracy, too

As the place where investment in movies is highest, Hollywood is the most expressive in denouncing movie piracy. However, Hollywood’s more productive Indian cousin Bollywood is now getting more and more vocal in its own concerns about this topic. I say more productive because Bollywood manages to churn out more movies each year than Hollywood does. The movie Mecca in India produces around 900 movies per year.

Bollywood movies shoot notoriously fast and cheap, so in terms of money, Hollywood still leads. The entire Bollywood turnover of 2009 equals the turnover of Avatar at around 2 billion dollar. American movies may still attract more investment, but budgets for Bollywood movies are rising, too. Rising investment also means that there is more attention to pirates eating away return on that investment.

Bollywood officials become more vocal about piracy and the need to find an appropriate answer. The market for counterfeited DVDs of Bollywood movies is roughly 30 times the size of the legitimate market in terms of volume. The estimate is that every year, 600 million pirated DVDs are sold in India, against 20 million legal DVDs.

Movie studios, both from Indian and American origin, have teamed up to establish an anti-piracy organisation, the Alliance Against Copyright Theft. The operations of this new-formed alliance has led to around 100 arrests and the seizure of over 400.000 pirated DVDs.

The newly found emphasis on piracy of Bollywood movies marks an interesting reversal. One of the strategies for growing a vibrant movie industry that Bollywood followed, was plagiarising Hollywood movies. Copyright infringement has therefore been part of a Bollywood tradition in another way. I do not argue that therefore, movie piracy in India is not a serious issue. But it is remarkable that throughout history, infringing intellectual property can be a choice of industrial sectors as much as consumers. In an industrial sense, it has been a successful way of stimulating economic activity and building industrial capacity. Consumer electronics giant Philips notoriously began producing incandescent light bulbs in the 1890s even though they were patented by Thomas Edison. And much more recently, did China have somewhat of a name of building its industrial base by copying Western technology.