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It’s a well know fact to any Muscovite that Gorbushkin Dvor is the place to go for all your pirated entertainment needs. For those of you not familiar with it, Gorbushka is a huge, five-story complex with several hundred individual vendors selling every sort of home appliance. There’s also a two-level section called Gorbushkin Dvor with enough pirated stuff to make the MPAA and RIAA drop dead on the spot. You can buy some licensed stuff there, but it’s out numbered by the pirated by at least 1000 to 1.

Despite the measures that the MPAA and RIAA have taken to try and ensure the end of bootleg copying, it’s still incredibly easy and cheap to buy pirated movies and music in Moscow. They can sue all they want in the US, but that approach isn’t going to work in Russia. Some Asian countries have cracked down on disc piracy in the last year (the Philippines took the steamroller approach), but it seems that Russia isn’t following suit.

Or maybe it is. In a very Russian sort of way. . .

Yesterday when I stopped at Gorbushka to pick up a few things (some legit, some not), I noticed a few banners that had been put up since the last time I was there. However, these weren’t the normal advertisements for new video releases or upcoming concerts. For example:

The banner reads: Ty piratskii disk kupil? Rubl’ piratu podaril! (Did you buy a pirated disc? Then you just gave money to a pirate!). Or how about these ones:

Slushai, pirat, pretenziyu: ya vybirayu licenziyu! (Listen up, pirate: I choose licensed merchandise!)
Pokupaesh’ piratskoye, obvorovyvaesh’ sebya! (When you buy pirated, you rob yourself!)
Otkaz ot lyevovo, dyelo pravoye (Rejecting piracy is a just cause!)

I was unsuccessful in finding out who put these banners up. They had no organization or company name on them and the vendors I asked didn’t know.

Either way, who are they kidding? Do they actually think that these things will be effective in deterring folks from buying pirated discs? People buying these discs already know that they are pirated. They don’t care if the money goes to the piracy industry as long as they can still buy DVD’s for four dollars.

It’ll be interesting to see how Russia deals with the problem of piracy in the coming years, considering how big of an operation it is here. It’ll take a while to eradicate, especially considering the way that they take care of things here.