Page 188 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media >> 175

of America, is part of a family that earns on average $76,000 a year, is highly
educated, and is tech-savvy.
Thus in one sense, this passport can be interpreted simply as a digital
media company’s claim that it is uniquely positioned to mediate American
media companies’ relations with a lucrative “ethnic market” and at the same
time create opportunities for Bollywood to extend its reach in the Ameri-
can media market. But I would argue that this “Passport to Bollywood” can
also be read as a marker of media industry professionals’ anxieties that stem
from the recognition that Bollywood’s cultural geography does in fact extend
well beyond the world that companies like Saavn.com are able to conjure.
The very notion of a “passport” suggests that there are borders to be defined,
maintained, and policed. It also speaks to the desire among industry profes-
sionals to control practices of sharing and circulating Bollywood content in
ways that transcend the traditional boundaries of the nation-state, linguistic
barriers, and market segments.
From the media industry’s perspective, copying and sharing media con-
tent constitutes piracy and little else. The issue of piracy has been a major
concern for the Bombay film industry for well over three decades now, and
especially since the late 1980s when recording technologies and the rapid
expansion of the cable TV market generated a new moment of crisis. But it
is only since the late 1990s that piracy has emerged as the challenge facing
Bollywood. Taking their cue from Hollywood, consultancy reports as well as
institutions like FICCI have dedicated considerable attention to the issue of
piracy, framing it as a problem that Bollywood and the Indian state together
need to address. In fact, virtually every FRAMES convention since 2006 or
so has included a panel discussion on this topic, with several industry profes-
sionals citing fantastic figures of lost revenues and jobs as they frame piracy
as the singlemost important obstacle in Bollywood’s otherwise smooth path
to becoming a global media industry. Not surprisingly, discussions at venues
like FRAMES, and state and industry discourse generally, approach the issue
of piracy in terms of a highly reductive legality/illegality binary. These dis-
cussions have also led to some high-profile initiatives such as the “antipiracy
coalition” launched in 2010 by the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) in collaboration with leading Bollywood professionals and compa-
nies, including Yash Chopra (Yash Raj Films), Siddharth Roy Kapur (UTV),
Ram Mirchandani (Eros International), and Sandeep Bhargava (Studio 18). 36
In addition to these initiatives, the decade 2000–10 has also been marked
by highly publicized and periodic raids of piracy hubs within India and in
other countries. Saavn.com’s “Passport to Bollywood” can therefore also be