It’s not often that you see people protesting for the right to do something that is pretty much illegal.
But that’s what happened in Yangon yesterday, when bootleg DVD sellers gathered to demonstrate against a recent crackdown on the trade.
About 50 vendors gathered in a field in Bahan township holding signs that read “Please think of the poor people who sell foreign DVDs to survive”, according to the Myanmar Times.
In Myanmar, the only way to watch foreign movies – without shedding loads of cash on streaming services using slow internet connections – is to buy them from bootleggers.
Vendors in downtown Yangon do a roaring trade in Hollywood films – which, we repeat, cannot currently be bought legally in the country.
Or, they did. Until recently, when the government announced that rules about distributing DVD – flouted for more than a decade – are actually going to be enforced.
The regulations require vendors apply for a license from the authorities and purchase the rights to their films from the original copyright holders.
Vendors argue that this would raise the price to unaffordable levels.
The rules also ask sellers to submit films for censorship.
“There are certain criteria for the censorship, such as the movie should be able to be watched by the whole family, or should not be overly divergent from Myanmar traditions, and so on,” U Min Tayza Nyunt Tin, a Myanmar expert working for the European Union’s Southeast Asia IPR-SME Helpdesk told the Myanmar Times earlier this month.
At yesterday’s protest vendors called for a loosening of the regulations.
“We are doing this business because of our country’s poor economy,” said Ko Tun Lin Aung, a DVD bootlegger from South Dagon township, told the Times. “We do not have a lot of money to invest in our business. This business can be done with a small amount of money.”
