China IP Piracy Ain't All That

Very interesting article in the most recent issue of the Journal of International Media and Entertainment Law by Aaron Schwabach, Associate Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. The article is entitled "Intellectual Property Piracy: Perception and Reality in China, the United States, and Elsewhere" [pdf] and its abstract describes it as follows:

This article is intended as a counterpoint to the all-too-frequent portrayal of China as the world's leading violator of intellectual property rights. In fact, by many measures, China, taken as a whole, is not the leading violator. Some measures show China as the leading violator only because they are aggregates, and do not take into account China's size. When figures are adjusted for population, China's rates of intellectual property violation are lower than those of many other countries, including the United States.
The article first looks at examples of the current round of political and media China-bashing. It then examines figures on international movie piracy provided by the Motion Picture Association (the international counterpart of the Motion Picture Association of America) and compares those figures to the populations of the countries involved. It concludes that the problem of movie piracy is more severe in the U.S. than in China, possibly because of greater broadband access, and more severe still in other countries, including France, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Hat tip to Tim Johnson at China Rises.

There is a line in the article I just love: "Someone who hijacks airplanes and pilots them into buildings full of people is an enemy. Someone who sells pirated copies of Rush Hour 3 is not." That is the kind of thing I am talking about when I ask for perspective.

Comments

Just one question here. who said the degree of violation shall be adjusted with population? If China send a missle to New York, 300,000 New Yorker dead, another 300,000 injured. Do we divide the casualty by the population of China? If so, China has the lowest war crime rate.

Posted by: Maoyuan | November 19, 2007 4:56 PM

Maoyuan, since when is killing 300,000 people comparable with file copying?

Posted by: Jake Stephens | November 20, 2007 5:41 AM

Since the music buying public started to realize that they were being swindled. Most of the money charged for a CD doesn't go to the artist that created it. It goes to the fat, bloated and lazy record companies that extort that money from their fans. It's the record companies and the corporations that own them that are comparing their loss in profits to genocide.

I love music, I hate the politics. I hate what the music industry has morphed into. Just when I thought that Milli-Vanilli was as low as the industry could sink, we get Britney and Jessica and groups like Metallica that actually admitted copying music as they were suing their fans for doing the same damn thing.

There are two choices going forward, as I see it. We either start executing people that copy music or the record industry and the RIAA must die. Given that the later is totally unable and unwilling to change and still clings to the idea that suing their customers is the best route to untold profits, I guess the government should stock up on guns and ammo for the firing squads...

Posted by: Robert White | November 21, 2007 7:30 AM

i get u!

Posted by: 離婚 | November 24, 2007 6:19 PM

Hi Dan,

I have some comments about Mr Schwabach's essay. You can find them here: http://ipdragon.blogspot.com/2007/11/schwabachs-essay-debunks-perception-ip.html

Cheers,
IP Dragon
Gathering, commenting and sharing information about IP in China to make it more transparent, since 2005

Posted by: IP Dragon | November 27, 2007 12:25 PM