A government minister has told an international film summit that the industry needs to agree what piracy is before it can agree how to fight it.
Gayton McKenzie, South Africa's Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, was speaking at the Lumiere Summit in the south of France, an event hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, which included a session billed as the race against piracy.
"We need to define what is piracy," McKenzie said.
His argument was that the industry applies different standards depending on the circumstances. When a film-maker's work is censored or banned, he said, piracy is welcomed as the way audiences get to see it. When viewers without the means to pay copy a film for other reasons, the same act attracts legal consequences. He described the approach as one of dual standards.
The point had a ready illustration from earlier in the session. The film-maker Tarik Saleh had described Egyptian audiences reaching his banned films through unofficial copies: "Egyptians love piracy, which is working very well for me."
McKenzie pressed the case for a different relationship between African film industries and the international market. "Don't try to punish us like we are children, because we are not children," he said.
He added: "We are not beggars. We want a partnership of equals."
The session also heard from the enforcement side. The chair of the French regulator Arcom reported 22,000 blocking and delisting injunctions over five years, and said the audience for pirated content in France has halved since 2018.
The definitional problem the minister identified is genuine, and on inspection it is broader than he put it. Two viewers may perform an identical act at the same instant, with the same file and the same connection, and be doing two different things, because the difference lies in whether the film is permitted where each of them happens to be sitting.
Piracy, on that reading, is not a property of the person copying. It is a property of the border. Move the viewer two hundred kilometres and the act changes category while nothing whatever happens to the file.
This newspaper regards the consequences as administratively significant. An enforcement regime built on that definition is not policing copying; it is policing location. On the same logic, Arcom's 22,000 injunctions are 22,000 findings about where people were.
It also opens a route to compliance that nobody appears to have costed. A distributor who wishes its audience to stop pirating a film need not sue anyone or block anything. It need only arrange for the film to be banned somewhere, at which point the copying becomes a celebrated act of cultural access and the enforcement problem resolves itself.
The Department of Unnecessary Research supports the minister's call for a definition and submits a first draft for the summit's consideration. Piracy is the unauthorised copying of a film that is allowed.