Had a bit of a surprise when I went to Yongsan Electronics Market today. When I walked down the main road, where all the pirate DVD vendors are, I discovered a distinct lack of pirate vendors. Instead, I found this:
(Sorry for the crappy quality… I only had my mobile phone camera with me)
There were no vendors at all on the street. Not anyone selling anything. Instead, they were playing that familiar Korean protest music and sitting on aluminum foil mats, protesting.
From what I can gather, a private company, Najin Industries, has taken control of the street vendor racket in Yongsan, and has given the boot to all the black market merchants who used to line the road. The DVD pirates were, of course, not taking this lying down. Well, they were lying down on their mats, but they were not going without a fight. They put up posters on the new vendor stalls, voicing their rage.
Fast crappy translation:
“Street Vendors of Iron”
Under flag of the national street vendor association, come together and fight through blood and sweat to get our things back. Only by getting together can we live….
Ugh. It repeats the same silliness over and over.
Hey, it’s the street vendor liberation song! You will have to imagine the martial tunes blaring on the loudspeakers, but here are their heartfelt words:
1) The more we are stepped on, the more we will stand up. We are fighting street vendors.
2) Even the if government will try to kill us, a million street vendors will march forward together.
Chorus: We will not retreat, to be human. We will get back all the disrespect at once.
Ahhhh. A million street vendors’ brothers, the promise we made, let’s win liberation.
And we had this handwritten sign:
“We’ve been here 10 years. We’re very poor, barely able to get by. As a father of my family, for 10 years, Najin Industries has been oppressing us, so we have nowhere else to go. We have to fight. Najin Industries has been lying to street vendors and they tried to make a fight between store vendors and street vendors. Najin Industries should receive our challenge.
“Najin should immediately stop removing the street vendors without offering alternatives. Guarantee our lives. Najin should be responsible for where we stay.”
Okay, I told you my paraphrase was fast, loose and crappy. But the original material is not going to win any poetry awards either. From the department of redundancy department.
There is something pretty special about so much self-righteousness coming from people whose entire livelihoods are built on stealing intellectual property.
So what does this all mean? Is Korea finally getting serious about cracking down on piracy? Nothing would make me happier if that were the case. Getting serious about combating pirate bootlegs would do more to help the local media business than any number of screen quotas or government-sponsored investment funds. However, a quick walk through the basement of the building right next store to the demonstrations revealed this:
Yep. plenty of places where you can buy all your usual Japanese anime and American TV shows. So if you need to stock up on your DVD collection, do not worry, there are still plenty of good locations.
Not that I bought any illegal DVDs. No, that would be wrong. Even for the shows that have not been released in Korea but that my girlfriend and I really want to see, that would be wrong.
And in an unrelated note, THE WIRE is the best television show, period. I quite enjoyed watching several episodes of season 2 this evening.
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