Kingsoft Corp.’s English-Chinese dictionary program is used on most of China’s 60 million PCs. That’s the good news. The bad news: Kingsoft doesn’t make any money from it, because 90 percent of those copies are pirated.
One by one, the Beijing-based software maker has seen its sales of such popular products destroyed after black market producers flooded the market with cheap copies.
Today, Kingsoft’s 600 programmers focus on making what it hopes can’t be copied — online games and business and anti-virus programs that have to be linked to its own computers in order to function.
“Piracy has had a big impact on us, making it so we can’t get powerful and compete with Microsoft,” said Ren Jian, a former Microsoft manager who is Kingsoft’s chief operating officer.
I've been interested in P2P since the early, high-flying days of Napster and KaZaA. I believe that analog copyright laws are ill-suited to the digital age, and that art and culture shouldn't be subject to the whims of international entertainment industry conglomerates. Twitter | Google Plus
