Piracy in China
Piracy in China
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.
Yes it's possible. Their version of Google Drive (Pan Baidu) is basically a paradise for piracy. But it's a bit of a pain in the ass for foreigners to get access. And obviously everything is in Chinese.
China doesn't care about foreign held copyright. So anything that isn't owned by a Chinese company is fair game. As long as it isn't considered banned material of course.
BaiduYun's a paradise to host pirated content but not to download. The free tier fucking limits you to double digit KBs per second and the Chinese government will arrest you if you create a script that simply uses aria2 to circumvent that (contrary to many of these Chinese arrest rumors this actually happened).
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.
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
I live in China. I download movies and TV shows via torrents without a VPN with no issues whatsoever.
If I'm not mistaken the Chinese torrent trackers goes offline several days in a year. The police "fight" with piracy but the trackers are tipped off before the operations so that copyright holders can be mitigated by doing that.
When I was in China my usual VPN I use for piracy and general privacy got through the great firewall no problem
I‘d be interested to hear that as well. :)
Here is a Kotaku article titled Bootleggers Explain Why There's So Much Video Game Piracy in China. It is from 2013 and I think there has been a size amount of legislation changes but it sounds like the grey market for video games was thriving thanks to console mods.
I could still see it existing today considering you do occasionally see someone selling drives full of pirated games. It might be a more local sneakernet style of system.
Good question though. I love hearing and learning about how piracy works in other countries.
A good read no doubt, it really makes it clear why piracy is and was often a necessity, not only for those who can't afford to pay for something, but also those who live in an authoritarian regime. I wonder how Lin and Yu would have fared after the ban was lifted.
The chinese state, as most authoritarian regimes are, is first and foremost concerned with maintaining power. They do this, primarily by suppressing political opposition. In furtherance of this goal, they restrict the flow of information that could encourage political opposition in any conceivable way. That is the main reason it exists.
They do crack down on piracy when economically beneficial, as I understand it. But it's not the purpose of the firewall and, even then, they do have means to circumvent it.
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