

China is struggling amidst a deluge of pirated material












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RE: Piracy is rampant in China
By lhlinlhlin on 1/17/2008 9:35:01 PM , Rating: 3
In fact, at the beginning of December I saw fully packaged Crysis games and Die Hard dvds on the shelves in professional looking packaging that were illegal copies. They can't easily control is because the average income over there is so low and people don't have money that of course they turn to piracy and other illegal activities.

Those probably are not the illegal copies. The reason why they can be so cheap because the introductory video contains at least 15 minutes commercial (to sponsor the cost) which can't be Fast Forwarded to skip away. Most of the movie consumption are from the Internet Bar (Internet Cafe) not at the movie theaters or DVD rental/purchase. Those internet cafes (around 120,000 stores in China; at least 12 million sites) license the pirated content from some portal sites who offer bitorrent or e-mule like files of the movie content. The consumers pay of 2~3 RMB (roughly 30 cents) per hour to watch the movies. It is a very different country even from the aspect of the same race like me ( a Taiwanese). I got a friend who used to have distribution right of various (sports, comedy, episode .... you name it) contents in China. After 2 years of work, he burn out all of his money and gave up, because the content value is zero in China unless you can find a way to sponsor it. All of the TV stations won't pay you the money for the content, but just open a time zone for you to broadcast it (in fact you have to pay for it in a tricky way). In order to make the money, you will have to find the commercials to sponsor it.
BTW, if you take serious about whatever the Chinese government says, I will say that you are too naive.

