Saturday, June 28, 2008

PAKISTAN! THE VICTIM OF PIRACY

The rapid growth of technology has brought lot of comfort to people in nearly every department of life। No matter it is their personal life, social life or working life। The technology has luckily made people like us also to dream of making a film. Thanks to the Modern Technology (digital cameras and editing systems)for encouraging us to see this dream, and thanks to movies like “CLERKS” to make us believe more and more that our dream can come true.
Though everything related to filmmaking is fascinating except for one………Piracy ! The activity which has not only troubled low/no budget filmmaker but even to big studios and huge production houses। And Pakistan film industry is one of the most severe victims of piracy. Pakistan is ranked at the top 3 countries involved in piracy. I have forgotten the other two names but I remembered the name of Pakistan.

Being neighbor of India and having nearly the same language Pakistani people has always been FAN of Indian movies. In the year 1965 when Indian movies were banned in Pakistan due to the war of 1965, people started smuggling it through the borders. This was the time when VCR was a new discovery. At that time even Pakistani movies were doing business up-to some extent but the results of foolish cencor ship policies of General Zia had started to occur. That was the time when the quality of Pakistani movies had started declining. Because of smuggled Indian movies with more quality(in terms of script, direction, and production) people started preferring to stay at home and rent out video castes instead of going to cinema houses to watch Pakistani movies.
And then came the era of Computers and everything got Digital। Computers got more and more cheaper day by day. CDs and DVDs were easily available on stores. The price of CDs these days is RS 30/- (Nearly less then a half US DOLLAR) and for DVDs is RS/- 90(Something around 1.5 US DOLLARS). Rainbow centre in Karachi is the biggest market of pirated CDs and DVDs. How much piracy is active in Pakistan? You can judge yourself by an example. When I visited rainbow centre 2 weeks after the release of SHREK 3 and SPIDERMAN 3 they both were available for sale (though I didn’t purchased them as I don’t have interest in movies with lot of post production work and animation involved). It was really shocking for me. The above example was just to tell you about how active piracy in Pakistan is. Hollywood is a little luckier than compared to Bollywood. Because people over here are not educated neither they have the skills to understand English. So majority of the movies released via piracy are just kept in showcases.


But the Indian movies as soon released in India are also releases in Pakistan on DVDs and CDs. The local cable networks purchase them and show them on cable. It results as any Pakistani movie released in Pakistan doesn’t gets the attention which it should have received. A question here arises that why Pakistan’s government do not take any action against these people. Well there are two reasons. First that these shops in RAINBOW centre belong to high ranked government officials. Secondly these people also provide all sort of software including all the operating systems. If the government bans the piracy, the education of software engineering will rise a lot as nearly new university/college/school is able to purchase the original softwares. Pakistan’s literacy rate is already very low. So any ban will influence the education system too.
I personally believe piracy isn’t right as it ruins the hard-work of filmmakers secondly due to piracy even Pakistani movies are not getting any attention as a result majority of the cinemas are closed, staff of cinema houses is getting unemployed.

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