ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the recent technological evolution and the economic and cultural practices of the Peruvian piracy market of music and audiovisual goods. Since 2003, the Peruvian state has been fighting against the physical piracy of audiovisual content by strengthening the punitive legal framework, financing educational campaigns, enforcing the seizure of materials, and developing judicial processes. This effort, however, has failed to reduce the thriving consumer market for pirated audiovisual goods in the country. Based on ethnographic evidence within the informal economy of digital copies of films, documentaries, songs, soap operas, and other audiovisual expressions, the chapter discusses the state’s understanding of piracy, the ineffectiveness of the strategies designed to combat it, and the paradoxical flourishing of alternative markets for Peruvian and non-Euro-American audiovisual products, which have generated new business models for moving between the informal and the formal economies.
