Pirates of the Yangtze

SHANGHAI, China-- To say that inexpensive DVDs and CDs are readily available in China is an understatement -- like saying Bill Gates has a modest amount of money. \nHere you can find almost any title you can think of, from a crudely-pirated and badly-subtitled version of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" to a pristine copy of the early Humphrey Bogart film "The Desperate Hours," for eight or 10 yuan per disc -- about U.S. $1. Altogether, I've bought more than a hundred DVDs and CDs here (for purely journalistic purposes) and most of the other Americans I know have purchased far more.\nPirated material is so prevalent here that when IU East Asian studies Professor Scott Kennedy suggested I visit a legal software store to see how ridiculously high prices are, I couldn't because I don't know where the legal stores are. I do know where the less-than-legal stores are, from the sidewalk vendors to the best DVD shop in Shanghai. You enter that store by going through a nondescript restaurant dining room, then the restaurant's kitchen and finally a speakeasy-like locked door. (For U.S. Customs purposes, of course, I'm sure these are all perfectly legitimate businesses.)\nWhile consumers like me appreciate the ample and cheap supply of films, TV shows, albums and software, the owners of those works think somebody is violating their intellectual property rights (IPR). And they're right: Intellectual property protection in China is still weak, despite periodic official proclamations that the government will crack down on piracy. As The Associated Press reported March 31, these campaigns "have had little visible effect on the consumer end."\nThis is a problem for creators, corporations and governments, who are losing hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars annually in royalty payments. They blame China, both its government and its culture, for these losses.\nKennedy thinks the current debate on IPR overlooks some important points. "China has made some real progress in IPR protection," Kennedy said in an e-mail interview last week. "The improvement is not the smashing of millions of bootleg copies, but elsewhere. China's legal infrastructure is much improved over the past. The laws on the books are first-rate, and judges are often finding on behalf of plaintiffs in IPR cases."\nMoreover, piracy is prevalent even in the First World -- just not in the same forms as in China. "It would be wrong to overlook the fact that American college students (and others, even some professors, I suspect) illegally download millions of songs each year from the Internet," Kennedy said. (Oh, Audiogalaxy, how I miss thee!)\nIt's hard for many Chinese to muster sympathy for the wounded-but-wealthy media conglomerates. This is a Third World country, after all, and people here see rich foreign companies more as exploiters than victims. The arguments go beyond simplistic antagonisms, though. \n"Many Chinese have pointed out to me that if they did not buy pirated software, they could not afford the software," Kennedy said. "Hence, some see U.S. hardline attitudes on IPR as carrying a hidden agenda of keeping China poor and undeveloped."\nThis idea is far-fetched (although reasonable by the standards of some of China's more nationalist schools of thoughts). Yet enforcing intellectual property rights as strictly as business groups want would indeed retard China's growth. \nThe best argument against pushing Beijing harder over this issue, though, is that the problem will go away eventually. As Kennedy said, "It's also important to remember that as a rule, piracy goes down as per capita income goes up. The U.S. and others have gone through the same. China's piracy problem is not cultural; Taiwan's piracy rates have dropped consistently as the island's wealth has increased."\nIn other words, the RIAA and other industry groups should relax. What else are they going to do -- sue a whole country?