Friday, October 16, 2009

Piracy in China?

If you didn't get the sarcasm in the title, you probably work for the media. This isn't the first time I've read an article about China that was old news to anyone who actually knows anything about China. Reuters makes it sound shocking that intellectual property thieves are selling illegal copies of Windows 7 only a week before its release. I've got news for Reuters, bootleggers have been selling illegal copies of Windows 7 for more than a year.

There is some logic in the article from analyst Matthew Cheung: "If you're trying to sell a program that costs 2,000 yuan to a student living on 400 yuan a month, that's simply not going to work out for most consumers." Really? Thank you, captain obvious.

It's not so much the individual users that software companies have a problem with--personal computers are still not as common as they are in the US. The major problem is Internet cafes and businesses that use pirated software--and the people who get the pirated software for these businesses don't usually buy it on the streets.

The media really needs to stop blowing these stories out of proportion. It might help if the people they hired to write these stories knew anything about China.

1 comment:

Ty Hism said...

Piracy is an issue in China, and morally it is not correct.Ever since Chinese started to use computer, they did not form the habit to buy software. On the flip side, software companies have to be blamed in terms of their strategy in late 90s. Selling software to cost arm and leg just does not work. They could offer student version software as they do in US, and by and by people will buy software and acknowledge the intellectual property. It is a tough sell, though.