This photo was taken at the Nash supermarket at Rio Mall in the South West of Moscow. Nash belongs to the Perekrostok group, but other large markets like the french Achuan also used to have shelfs full of DVD’s, CD’s and MP3 CD’s. What looked as licensed content on first sight, always made me suspicious, because $2 per disc and lower prices, even for recent blockbusters, such as Borat were just way to low. Yesterday I witnessed employees of Nash market clearing out these shelfs. If look closely, you can see the MP3 lable on the right. This is probably another result of the governments recent hard policy against piracy.

Nevertheless this won’t really make a difference and going after the shops won’t hurt the producers much. As long as the average Russian makes between $300-1000 salery/month, he won’t spend $10-30 for a DVD. Apparently there are three large producers of the pirated materials in Russia. These producers also control all production facilities for CD’s and DVD’s. In other words, if Sony wants to bring out a DVD movie on the Russian market, they have to work with one of these, who is also producing the pirated materials. I also heard, that there are agreements between the media companies and the producers, which movies will be released (and when) on the black market. As long as the government can’t control the production facilities or reach an agreement with the pirates, the stuff will still be sold on the streets, the internet and in other underground channels.