ABSTRACT
Arguably, piracy is active and popular in all developing countries – if not all countries – but among them, China is particularly stigmatized. Its “barbarous” copyright offenses are generally considered a manifestation, among many, of the country’s emerging threat to the established world order. According to some estimates, 91 percent of the desktop software used in China in 1999 was pirated (SIIA 2000), and 95 percent of the transactions in audiovisual materials was carried out on the black market (G. Yang 1999). The millions of copies of pirated IP products sold in China can easily be translated into American dollars to represent the alleged loss of the copyright owners. According to an outraged report in The New York Times, pirated VCDs of Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas were found all over China within a week of the film’s debut in the United States, and pirated copies of Titanic outsold legitimate ones by about thirty to one. “The [piracy] trade has made it almost impossible to sell legitimate videodiscs [in China], and dampened the lure of Hollywood films in movie theatres” (Smith 2000). The common understanding in the international business world is that this piracy is nothing but robbery, which the Chinese government tacitly ignores, and which the Chinese people fervently and shamelessly support.
