Doug’s World

Shiver me timbers

I’ve always wanted to see one of the infamous bootleg software markets in India that I’ve heard so much about, but every time I’m there I either run out of time or don’t know where to go. Today, thanks to a brief reunion with two friends I’ve not seen for a while, I got my chance. Pali and Tarun remembered that I wanted to see something like this from a conversation in Bangalore last year and made it happen. Thanks, guys!

Delhi’s biggest and boldest pirated software marketplace is Nehru Place. It’s in a busy part of town, out in plain view and not hidden in any way. You can find everything for sale from motherboards and memory and other hardware items, to software (name it, you can buy it), to services ranging from hardware repair to refilling printer cartridges. Most of the technology products are on the 1st floor, in stalls along a walkway above the courtyard.

The software vendors have photocopied lists of products in alphabetical order, and you can purchase a collection of items from the list, or a single product if it’s especially large or popular. Vista or Office were advertised many places, but I get those for free at work so I wasn’t tempted. Xbox games seem to be hot items as well.

There are two packaging options, depending on whether you need a counterfeit package in addition to the bootleg software. (For resale, for instance. :-))

If you just want the software, you get a disk in a CD sleeve, with the product name written on the disk in a permanent marker. The other option is packaging that is a clone of the original retail package, with full-color copies of the original artwork glued to the box. These are very realistically done, right down to the certificate of authenticity that appears on Microsoft products.

Quality control isn’t what it could be on the simple unpackaged disks, but for these prices what do you expect? For example, I bought a disk full of Lotus products, or so I thought, but when I looked at the disk in my laptop I found it included a “Loan Spread Calculator” as the first program, and the last program listed in the readme file, Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition Release 9.8, wasn’t included. So apparently somebody was copying products to disks alphabetically and made a mistake on where the Lotus entries started and ended.

The price is usually about 100 rupees (a little over $2), although it seems to vary based on popularity of the specific software included. I paid 300 rupees for Adobe CS3, 200 rupees for a bunch of handy graphics utilities, and 50 rupees for the Lotus collection shown above. I could have purchased CS3 from a different vendor for 100 rupees, but he needed 20 minutes to burn the DVD. A classic case of just-in-time inventory creating savings that are passed on to the consumer, but I paid triple the price (about $8) to avoid waiting.

I was told that most of the software comes from Singapore. There are occasional raids by the police, but things get back to normal pretty quickly afterward. Sounds to me like the war on software piracy is about as effective as the war on terrorism and the war on drugs. Cocaine has never been cheaper or more plentiful in the US, suicide bombings have never been so common in the Middle East, and in India a disk containing ready-to-install copies of all the products to the right costs less than the price of lunch at the nearby Subway, Sbarro, or Starbucks.

As we wandered past the various shops I found myself remembering that book “Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja.” Its author, Amit Gilboa, paid for a child prostitute to collect material for his book. This earned a predictable reaction from most quarters (Amazon banned the book for a while), but the author insisted it was “investigative journalism” since he didn’t actually have sex with her.

I have a similar rationalization regarding the three disks I bought. Sure, I helped support the software piracy economy with my transaction, but these disks are just souvenirs as long as I don’t follow these simple and enthusiastic instructions …

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 2:47 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.