Most of the copyleft, freeware, shareware, rights-reversed movement is just starting in Bucharest, Romania. This city has the infrastructure, but seems to lack the words to describe its semi-legal or highly illegal arrangements.
Even so, piracy is endemic to the region. This harks back to the communist era, when the most basic Western goods gained a high exchange power, and the original quickly became replicated on the burgeoning black market following the rise and fall of Turkey-oriented trade routes.

The pirate videotape and the audio-cassette market followed this rhythm of immediate availability within a home-video and tape-recorder network that defied censorship, state propaganda, strictly limited TV, and a poorly developed popular culture. By 1989, if anybody in a medium-sized village had a video player, they were sure to have a good selection of pirate videos, ranging from Rambo and Schwarzenneger all the way down to the worst kind of gory sexploitation movies. The unifying characteristic of these videos was their cheap, poorly dubbed, poorly recorded quality and the ghastly single-voice translation accompanying all the characters in the movie. They were usually easy to track down since they had the same source, the same translators, and the same copy-to-copy production system. Besides their trashy, handmade, black-and-white covers, these poor relatives of their Western counterparts had to be shown on the black-and-white TVs that still dominated the country. I first saw most of the old colour home-video classics as artificial »noir« versions. Then the 1990 explosion came, with colour TV and multi-channel networks spinning their webs across the gulfs separating the communist concrete blocks. The range of CDs available grew parallel to the numerous portable audio-cassette stalls offering greater diversity than ever before with pirated, rare cassettes and genre-oriented street shopping. Besides the MTV dance-music top ten, you could find the latest synthesizer classics compilation, Karl Schulze, Vangelis, MC Hammer, Enigma and much more.

An intermediate phase was to be the rise of pirate software and CDs coming out of former USSR countries such as Russia or Ukraine. A lot of cracked software and the latest CD rips found their way from Eastern-based hackers. It also meant a rise in quality, as exclusive compilation versions with under 500 copies made their presence felt. This was the rise of obscure taste, cherished by jaded aficionados hiding behind the pirated copies of limited number labels such as Ars Nova. Now, you were part of an obscure community vying for O Yuki Conjugate, FM Einheit, Tuxedo Moon and Coil. Still later came the Russian mp3-CDs offering you nearly the whole discography of ambient heroes such as Robert Rich and Brian Eno, but also harsh rhythm’n’noise and beatnoise compilations, besides Nurse With Wound and Allerseelen. Computer games, demos and everything else followed the same route.
The arrival of high-velocity internet connections and CD and DVD writers came as a natural development; as natural as the way in which deep immersion into the sea of information developed into a full-time activity. Menus, lists and personal folders were just information trails shared as a common guiding experience in immersion. Unfulfilled desires or restricted knowledge were never of much importance here. More access didn’t just quench the information thirst of young, outwardly-oriented, hardcore net-addicts: More access meant more possibilities to add on indefinitely. This was a daily informational supplement available for the sharing activities that seem to characterize rip-off cultures. Archives are not just abstract accretions of names; they follow their own internal mechanisms that drive them towards free-exchange and general dispersion. Peer-to-peer hubs on the net, local networks established by students or neighbourhood/bedroom networks in Bucharest are directly responsible for the widespread distribution and general availability of usually ultra-rare materials.
Incoming CDs followed the Internet boom and Internet crash. Talented web-designers and 3D artists first took job offers in Germany before finally returning to Romania with portable CD-cases full of hundreds of kilogrammes of Internet-ripped movies and games. They brought back home entire mobile libraries fuelling the growing taste for Japanese directors such as Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano, as well as Lars von Trier. A must-have is the whole filmography of Andrei Tarkovsky, so that you can easily embarrass any TCM/TNT channel surfer.

The gigabyte factor is also there, where quantity means careful and apt selection, re-writing and re-capturing newer versions, more professional and fewer handheld-camera-in-the-dark-during-the-premiere recordings. In this context, owners are better thought of as open sources aiming to concentrate and then to disperse knowledge in the form of plastic bags, packages, and backpacks full of CDs that are freely circulated. An example of these non-profit, personal archives is the one complied by Nuke in Bucharest. Growing and expanding from a core formed of mainly Japanese animation series and full-length features, it has the capacity to become one of the biggest independent CD archives in the country. A list of the archive’s contents arranged according to its simple, alphabetical classification system is available online. Nuke’s address is widely known within the underground otaku networks, and not just there, since everybody is welcome to visit his neighbourhood flat. CD archives in Bucharest are crossing generation and working milieu boundaries. Archive masters can be undergraduates, postgraduate or people without an academic background: bodyguards, exotic dancer impresarios, architects or web designers. It is only their passion for certain cultural aspects or subcultural concerns that unites them, be these obscure jazz music, certain film directors, or scanned posters and comic books.
Inter-city exchanges also take place, as young teenagers such as Daos from the city of Brasov carry their CD backpack libraries with them whenever they visit Bucharest or whenever they visit friends. Daos, for example, always has a few blank CDs among his more than 150-CD backpack library so he can easily swap information, whether mp3, movies, software, games or the last exam bibliography and test subjects. Everything is shared and swapped, far away from schools, academies and official channels.
Hard disks are also mobile parts that are carried around and connected in a peer-to-peer action. They became the ceremonial hubs in the rip community, as they absorb all or most of the information available for CD or DVD copying. The ensuing copying process also means regaining vital memory space on the hard disk for further sessions. For smaller distances inside the city, they are the preferred information carrier. Still, they are sensitive to temperature changes and hard disks are said to ‘break’ or ‘crack’ easily – followed by a woeful loss of information.

Hard disks have become indications of success or failure in accommodating more and more information. Today, there are special parties where people celebrate their 7th hard disk! The hard disk’s enhanced capacity is a measure of self-reappraisal and heightened importance gained trough mainframe expansion.
The basic recognition factor implies that each time hard disk owners meet they will ask each other about new capacity changes and/or about the new items on their download lists. It is both a sizing up and a calculated move as to the needs and possibilities of the next sharing partner.
Cooperation emerges even though the scope of the sharing remains vague and undefined. You look for something that the other might have, but you never know for sure what to expect. By the way, surfing through ripped files and folders on somebody’s hard disk is not so much peeking as a survival cost-benefit strategy. On the Internet you never know what you can find and where to look for it. Since hard disks already contain selected and tabulated material, they offer the best chance of finding the shortest way to the information you may blindly search for on the Net. These private hard disks with personal rips are the organizational matrix for many of the thinly spread subcultural or countercultural trends and artefacts in the city.

I would argue that the fundamental aspect of contemporary rip-archivist manias is their incommensurable growth rate. Most of these portable or local rip archives are impossible to assess and are ultimately impossible to track down and consume. They go well beyond immediate needs and utilities. Their weight is the weight of uncounted resources and freely, ready-to-be-used resourcefulness.
Whatever their final implications, rip-off practices in Bucharest are always an indicator of the next cultural shifts to come and the close cooperative links growing in their wake.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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