In Pasaje 18 of Lima's Polvos Azules shopping mall, you'll find racks of DVD burners humming away while fluorescent lights cast their glare across the glitter of thousands of bootleg movies in telltale cellophane wrappers. It looks like a scene right out of cyberpunk. But for many Peruvians, whose access to alternatives like Netflix is hampered by some of the slowest internet speeds on the globe, bootleg DVDs remain a primary source for accessing current movie releases.
Motherboard's Mariano Carranza recently paid a visit to Lima to check out how the DVD bootleggers operate, and they said Johnny Law has cooled down on the piracy crackdown in recent years. It hasn't always been that way; As a shop owner named El Chino told us, "I had problems with the law about 11 years ago. They'd stop by and confiscate my films. But they don't do that anymore, mainly because this has grown too much." In 2006, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) estimated that some 98 percent of music distributed in Peru between 2004 and 2005 was pirated.