Piracy

The unauthorised copying, sale or streaming of a film. In Philippine film history it has to be held in two hands at once, and the course does not resolve the tension because the tension is the fact.

On one side, the money is real and it comes out of people who have no cushion. Leo Katigbak, who ran the country’s largest restoration project, puts it as somebody not getting hired in a business that is barely hanging on. On the other side, for a great deal of Filipino cinema a bootleg copy was the only way to see the work at all, at a fraction of a ticket price that already ran to a meaningful share of a day’s wage. Naming only the first half makes it a story about Filipino character. Naming only the second makes it a story with no victims. Naming both makes it what it is, which is a distribution failure with a cost attached.

Source: Inquirer, “Philippine film industry in decline,” on bootleg discs sold in Manila “sometimes on the same day the films opened in cinemas,” https://entertainment.inquirer.net/30455/philippine-film-industry-in-decline . The two-sided reading is Leo Katigbak’s, given on camera in the FDCP talkback “Lessons from Sagip Pelikula,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fPxvTnnCsQ , where he also argues that Philippine copyright protection of 50 years, against 95 in the United States, removes a producer’s commercial reason to preserve a film at all.

First used in: 3.5 · Freedom came, the audience did not