Pirates of the Ring of Fire

When I was visiting Claremont McKenna College a few years ago as part of the long drawn-out college admissions process, I joined a law class, where the professor asked his students "what is legal." The agreed upon definition ended up being "almost everything average people do on a daily basis". This may be true in the US, but not so much in Indonesia. It's a nessecesity to break traffic laws, and sometimes pay off police men. Teenagers smoke cigarettes in public even though they are underage. Books are photocopied and read as so. The thing that strikes me the most, however, is the wide spread pirating of TV and movies. Bootleg movies are more widespread than the originals! When you enter a video shop, you look through rows of plastic cellophane bags. See a movie you like, you slip out the disc (usually its scratched in someway) and put it into one of the many DVD players that the video store provides you. Then, you scan through all chapters to make sure there are no stops. Lately, I've been wondering how these discs get so scratched in the first place! Anyway, once you are satisfied that your discs work, you take them to the register and pay 50 or 60 cents per disc. Some of you may be horrified that your favorite actors and directors aren't getting royalties (most I'm guessing don't care though, haha) but pirated movies are close to a necessecity for movie lovers. Insonesia is a country that censors sex so heavily, that when I go to the movies I don't always know whats going on since the government has cut several scenes important to the plot. In a video store, however, you can buy "wonderful" movies like "Wet Dreams 2" and all the, um, scenes that would have otherwise been censored. I, myself, don't buy such movies, but it's nice to actually understand the plot of a good movie that just happen to contain a few sex scenes.

Another branch of pirating is TV and software. I personally don't have experience with pirated software, though I know you can get stuff like Photoshop for free. The TV side is a much bigger deal to me. In Indonesia, you can't access Hulu, and youtube works excrutiatingly slowly. Certain American shows are just not aired on Indonesian TV. So how do you get these wonderful shows in the world of anime and soap opera? You download them onto a disc or a flash drive and watch them that way.