While the plot in Pirates of Bollywood rests on a panoply of figures and their familiar agendas, it interlinks their stories in fairly engrossing ways. The background is the glamorous but devious—the Mumbai film industry where producers of music and film are portrayed as being threatened by rampant and large-scale piracy of copyrighted content. Much to the industry’s chagrin, piracy has been given a fillip by the presence of online file sharing platforms that provide the much-needed anonymity making it difficult to employ the rule of law. This is further complicated with the presence and deep involvement of a network of underground organizations that thrive on piracy and who have in turn managed to co-opt those very people purportedly affected by these illegalities.
The novel revolves around a retaliation strategy to this ever-expanding network of piracy in the form of a massive cross-industry project called Project Pi that aims at taking legal recourse to protect profits that piracy automatically depreciates. A counter viewpoint is put forward by the advocates of copyleft, challenging the very idea of rights associated with creative content and support technology that allow for free sharing of any content.
Another strand central to the novel a murderous group of unnamed pirates whose shadowy appearance at critical junctures is meant to add thrill to the legal plot. In addition, the police is a continuous presence, particularly Helen, a female police officer, who with a team of male police officers, works at seemingly indefatigable infrastructure of organised piracy.
The strength of the book is the author’s ability to render professional knowledge about intellectual property into everyday conversation within topical contexts. One learns not only about basic legal concepts such as patent and copyright but also about not-so-popular things such as John Doe and Jane Doe orders relating to piracy, and the copyleft movement, among others.
As a novel, however, it fails to adequately develop its characters, providing sketchy representations of its protagonists. The “assassins” are described in broad strokes and their motivations are limited to avarice, disadvantaged backgrounds or unexplained violence.
Even while portraying Helen, the author relies on obvious tricks in the book to describe her abilities and adds to this stereotypical (and some might say sexist) overtones of her being the object of desire of the various men that she interacts with. All in all, this is a pacy novel offering a glimpse into the risky world of intellectual property in a form that one might call quintessentially Bollywood.”