“…Mainland China is the piracy capital of the world. China’s imitation industry feeds not just its own economy, but those of other nations as well; 46 percent of the pirated goods sold in America come from China, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA). The Quality Brands Protection Committee (QBPC), an anti-piracy body under the auspices of the China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, claims that government statistics show that counterfeits outnumber genuine products in the Chinese market by 2 to 1. Pirated audiovisual materials occupy 95 percent of the market in large cities, and the proportion approaches 100 percent in the rural interior. Stricter laws have stemmed the tide only slightly, because anti-piracy law, like most of Chinese law, is enforced haphazardly at best, and everyone knows it.
“Enforcement efforts are made even more futile by popular acceptance of piracy. Rising incomes have created an enthusiasm for foreign goods and brands, but Chinese consumers have become so accustomed to cheap, pirated goods that they are unwilling to pay full prices for the real thing. Traditional Chinese moral relativism combines with a modern sense of short-term opportunity cost and self-interest to justify what everyone knows to be wrong and illegal.
“Piracy is one of the largest flies in the ointment of China’s supposed economic miracle. Dollar figures for losses attributed to counterfeit goods are notoriously hard to pin down, but there appears to be little question that whatever the numbers are, they are big — the Business Software Alliance (BSA) claims that software piracy in China alone costs the industry $4 billion a year worldwide. And while the multinational giants will hardly be sunk by piracy’s encroachment on their profit margins in China, the situation is especially grim domestically. Piracy severely hampers the international competitiveness of Chinese companies, and the lack of adequate intellectual property protection dampens the impetus for local corporate, scientific and artistic innovation.
“And yet, China’s intellectual property mess isn’t entirely bleak. Piracy may be bad for business, but it’s great for consumers, and in some ways good for society. By providing small-business opportunities to the uneducated, unemployable underclass, piracy helps relieve China’s mounting social unrest. The production of imitation goods, or “daoban” in Chinese, has become one of the country’s major light industries, employing both the growing masses of workers laid off from state-owned industrial behemoths and the floating population of illegal migrant laborers…”
Click here to read the full four-page Salon feature article.
Related Posts
- U.S. may slap China with suit in intellectual-property dispute
- Innovation Best Antidote for Piracy in China
- China Plans to Develop Its Own DVD Format
- Yahoo China sued by music site for copyright violation
- China crisis for web’s biggest names
Loading ...
