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Avast, Matey: Fighting Pirates In China
from the arrrrrrrrr dept
We’ve noted how instead of relying solely on lawsuits, entertainment companies are actually attempting to innovate in China to get around piracy. Now, one company works for record labels and movie studios as a hired gun, hunting down the people that run file-sharing sites and instead, of suing them, trying to get them to become licensed, paid services. A consultant in China says part of the problem there is that there are few legitimate channels for people to use, so they turn to piracy, pointing out how there’s just one movie theater for every 450,000 people in the country. It’s an issue that transcends just China, though: when there’s a lack of attractive legitmate channels — whether they’re too expensive or their content has too many restrictions — people will turn to less legal alternatives. Shutting down service after service won’t do any good unless people are given a reasonable legal alternative.
Comments on “Avast, Matey: Fighting Pirates In China”
Give them choices
I have friends who are expats in Viet Nam. They cannot buy unpirated movies (DVD or VHS). They can’t even go see movies that are released in the US. So they have two options. 1. Don’t see the movie at all. 2. Buy the pirated DVD. The latest Star Wars Movie had the scroll in the begining in Cyrillic and the closed captioning was in Mandarin, but they could see the movie.