Piracy Preserves Data and Media that Otherwise Wouldn't be Preserved

In Nigeria as elsewhere, piracy creates new kinds of archives inconceivable outside of this mode of media reproduction. In markets specializing in wholesale tape duplication, sellers have sprung up specializing in the storage and preservation of different music forms. These sellers maintain substantial archives of Indian film songs, traditional Hausa singers such as Mamman Shata and Musa ‘Dan Kwairo, and new music forms such as bandiri, a religious music that takes tunes from Hindi films and changes the words to sing praises to the Prophet Mohammed. Customers go there to commission bespoke cassettes— compilations of hard-to-get Hindi film songs, or unavailable songs of older Hausa singers. Like most pirate archives, from Internet databases like BitTorrent to religious music sellers to diasporic ethnic video shops, these archives make available specialist media content that lacks the mass appeal that renders other media forms cost effective. Piracy facilitates this archiving practice.

Brian Larkin, Pirate Infrastructures (2007)

• digital preservation
• piracy
• pirate culture