Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy.

The article discusses the infrastructure of piracy in relation to the Nigerian video. It is through a generative quality that pirate infrastructure is expressive of a paradigmatic shift in Nigerian economy and capital and represents the extension of a logic of privatization into everyday life. Piracy's negative characteristics are often commented on: its criminality, the erosion of property rights it entails, and its function as pathology of information processing, parasitically derivative of legal media flows. In addition to generating new economic networks, piracy like all infrastructure modes, has distinct material qualities that influence the media that travel under its regime of reproduction. Piracy's success lies in its own infrastructural order that preys on the official distribution of globalized media, thus making it part of the corruption of infrastructure. The everyday practice of piracy in Kano was based around the mass distribution of the two most popular drama forms, Indian and Hollywood films and the reproduction of televised Hausa dramas and Islamic religious cassettes. Hausa distributors have had to rely on Lebanese and Indian traders for access to foreign videos that were coming from the Persian Gulf. As Hausa film exploded in popularity, the style and shape of the video market changed considerably. Following the introduction of sharia law in Kano State, all Hausa film was banned. Filmmakers responded to the government's ban by organizing themselves under the Kano State Filmmakers Association.