I am curious about something that came to my mind recently and that is, in China is it possible to pirate and how?
About China I only know about the firewall and little else, so before I say something idiotic or something that sounds very ignorant, I'd rather you enlighten me.
Chinese piracy is ...odd. But generally speaking, yes they love to pirate shit. Most disc movies over there are counterfeits, not official. So most home media purchases are pirated.
People are able to get past the firewall pretty easily, the same information needed for P2P is needed to get past the great firewall. So if you're able to get past the firewall, you're probably able to download games without being caught. Separate from the great fire wall, Android is by far the most used operating system in Asia as a continent. There is a constant flow of apps like 4Shared and Zedge that provide access to pirated content with pretty much no barriers and they succeed quite well in China.
Piracy over there is pretty much a norm, whether you're knowingly pirating or not. Linus Tech Tip's Chinese channel is ran by Chinese pirates that the company hired eventually. But the Chinese front for that channel is literally just some random guys that started downloading the videos, translating them and posting them for the ad revenue. Sure the viewers may not have known it was pirated, but the viewers were still technically pirating 🤷♀️
Most disc movies over there are counterfeits, not official.
I live in a neighbor country of china. We grow up watching movies on VCD, DVD from China. There is no shop or market for original movie VCD or DVD. The original would be too much expensive and no one will buy.
Thank you for that tidbit! My Grandpa worked over in China and would always bring movies back over. Got Ice Age 2 months early! I always wondered why the Chinese movies looked so much choppier, a different format makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I'd imagine that you guys could have bought 20 pirate DVDs for the price of like 1 legit one. Plus, could be wrong, but my Grandpa said the pirated movies were usually the US releases so they were the uncensored versions of the movie. A better product for a better price, there's no reason to buy the originals.
China (and local business men) usually have multiple times of profit from the same movie.
Early released movies are not good quality. But they would sell it and people would buy it. When the movie was officially released, they would sell the same movie again as better version of the movie. Sometimes they will even sell 4 in 1 (4 movies in a single disc), different movie with same name, prequels and BluRay version.
I think your choppy version is the product of the early profit model of Chinese business men.
Not to mention ign-games (bad ik just an example) and gog and fitgirl-repacks and some others aren't blocked
Also on the LTT part, it's still not really piracy (partly because it's free) and Bilibili's ad revenue is quite low (partly because THEY HAVE NO ADS IN THE VIDEO PLAYER WTF HOW IS YOUTUBE STILL); it's perfectly plausible that they did it as a hobby