Media piracy is part of the ‘organizational architecture’ of globalization, providing the infrastructure that allows media goods to circulate. Infrastructures organize the construction of buildings, training of personnel, the building of railway lines and the elaboration of juridical-legal frameworks without which movement of goods and people can not occur. But once in place infrastructures generate possibilities for corruption creating unofficial networks that feed off existing infrastructures and use them for their own purposes. Media piracy, famously, is one such parasite. Our understanding of it is dominated by its negative character – its criminality and the erosion of property rights it entails – but the danger in reducing piracy solely to legal questions is seeing through the phenomenon itself. Piracy is not simply parasitic but generative, it doesn’t simply corrupt but builds and is not merely a neutral conduit of traffic but is a mediating force. In the case of Nigeria this is seen most strikingly in the phenomenal rise of a new video industry making feature length films shot, distributed, and consumed mainly through domestic video consumption. This industry has pioneered a new film form and generated an entirely novel form of reproduction and distribution and to do this has relied on the capital, equipment, personnel, and distribution networks created to facilitate pirate media. Nigerian videos are a legitimate media that could not exist without depending heavily on the infrastructure created by its illegitimate double, pirate media. In this paper I wish to offer suggestions about how to look at rather than through piracy, to examine four points I see as the consequence of how this form operates in Nigeria.
