‘Pirates’ of the Lower Rio Grande: Underground Goods Consumption of Unauthorized Music, Software, Movies, Cable, and Internet Service in South Texas

The focus of this paper is on the individual and collective household consumption of five commonly pirated goods— unauthorized music, software, movies, cable, and internet Service—in the South Texas borderlands. To better understand the consumption of these underground goods, a survey was constructed and administered to 357 respondents in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the summer of 2010. Because of the illegal nature of pirated goods consumption, the purposive (and generally representative) sample was acquired through locally embedded and trained BorderLife participants from the University of Texas-Pan American utilizing a snowball sampling design. I find that 64.6% of respondents have engaged in the unauthorized purchase of at least one of the five identified goods with individual good consumption rates ranging from 22.5% for pirated cable or internet service to a high of 56.4% for pirated movies. The paper also details and models the determinants of unauthorized goods consumption within the South Texas borderlands milieu.