Fake Facts - An Incredulous Look at Piracy Statistics in India

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to uncover the manner in which the avalanche of piracy statistics has successfully wrestled control over the boundaries within which piracy may be discussed in the press. “Piracy statistics” today are only reflective of the quantity of ‘pirates’ and do not tell us, for instance, the caste-wise or age-wise or monthly-income-wise demographic of these pirates. They do not prompt a deeper reflection on issues such as endemic unemployment, affordability and access to culture, and have been remarkably successful in sustaining media attention on a drummed up notion of national loss . In doing so, they have also had astonishing success in perpetuating the image of their own value-neutrality. This chapter attempts to investigate what this body of piracy accounts continuously told, revised and retold in newspapers over the past decade can reveal to us.

Keywords: intellectual property, statistics, newspapers, copyright, piracy