Mixed by Erry, the man who had him arrested speaks out: «He was a pirate, not a gentleman»
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We like Naples because it is the most tolerant city in Italy, perhaps in the world. For better or for worse: integration has never been a problem under Vesuvius, of course. But only here can it happen that a company dedicated to audiovisual counterfeiting – a criminal business in which the Camorra invested substantially – turns into the icon of a picaresque war against the strong powers of the recording industry. It happens in Mixed by Errythe latest film by the talented Sydney Sibilia written together with the volcanic Armando Festa, to be released in all theaters on March 2nd.
The work recounts the deeds of the homonymous «brand» which between the 1980s and 1990s «dealed» first cassette tapes and then pirated CDs from Naples to the rest of Italy. It worked more or less like this: you went to your trusted stall and for the modest price of 2,500 lire excluding VAT (in the sense that it was all black market) you bought the «last» by Zucchero, Pino Daniele or Eros Ramazzotti in cassette format «stamped» by mysterious “hacker” ante litteram. But beware: “Photocopied cassettes are not Mixed by Erry,” read the warning, because even the quintessential (music) pirate had his own problems with piracy. Behind the brand were the Frattasio brothers, protagonists of the biopic of Sibilia and at the center of the book of the same name by Simona Frasca published by Ad Est dell’Equatore.
«There is a very romantic narration of what piracy was like at the time of Maradona’s Naples. In some ways it is understandable: the big record companies, in the perception of a large part of the public, are the gentlemen in limousines, the system to be brought down, the “bad” of the story. The pirate is the hero, at most the anti-hero, the one who fights against a legal world for, in some respects, seems worse than him. But in this way two non-secondary aspects are overlooked. On the one hand piracy fed the mafias, on the other it took away revenues from an industry, consequently putting jobs at risk”. Speaking is Enzo Mazza, today CEO of Fimi, the Confindustria association of the majors, at the time of Mixed by Erry secretary of Fpm, the anti-piracy federation that played an important role in Erry’s arrest. Yeah, because Enrico Frattasio ends up in handcuffs in 1997 and four years later he will be sentenced to 4 years and six months in prison for criminal association and violation of the copyright law together with his brothers Angelo, Giuseppe and Claudio and his father Pasquale .
Mazza, who was Mixed by Erry really?
A pirate, without a doubt. When we talk about it, we cannot ignore the context. In the 1990s, an era of still “physical” music that moved very important figures (in 1996 the turnover was 39.6 billion dollars ed), the international record industry found itself faced with a growing phenomenon of music piracy in Italy which in some cases even exceeded our borders, with products that also reached the United States. Millions of dollars of damage to the sector were caused by multiple organizations active in southern Italy in particular, so much so that the US Department of Commerce had blacklisted Italy with the provision of trade sanctions for non-compliance with international intellectual property rules .
This is where you come into play…
This is where Fpm comes into play, because Ifpi and Riaa, the international and American federations of the sector, decided to create, together with the Italian industry represented by Fimi, this organization dedicated to contrasting the phenomenon, headed by the former coordinator for Italy of the Business Software Alliance, a US association for the fight against computer piracy. The Fpm was supposed to coordinate the awareness-raising activities of the institutions, support the investigations of the police and the judiciary and communicate anti-piracy messages.
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