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Shanghai surprise

Internet piracy has Hollywood scared—but it may solve another problem

[Screen]

Venture into China’s bustling street markets and you soon begin to realise the scale of the problem the entertainment industry is facing with movie and music piracy. It’s not just seeing titles that haven’t even been released in local theatres selling for $3. It’s talking to Chinese mainlanders who have grown up on a diet of pirated DVDs, VCDs and plain old CDs and are now embracing the web to feed their appetites for free, mainly Western, movies.

In March I met a group of Chinese executives in the major industrial city of Shenzhen. The lunchtime conversation turned from the booming Chinese tech sector, to the difference between ‘real’ Chinese food and the stuff they make in Hong Kong, to where to find good quality knock-off DVDs. My hosts knew the last topic inside out and were soon scribbling down addresses both physical and virtual. Because buying pirated films is the norm, it’s harder to find the real thing in China than a bootleg. It’s estimated that 90 percent of DVDs sold there are pirated.

I wouldn’t be the first Kiwi to have headed home from Asia with a handful of pirated discs, but an incident in Shanghai a few years back put me off engaging further in the trade.

I remember being led up a flight of stairs into a grimy apartment behind some inner-city markets, where a middle-aged man showed me boxes full of DVDs. He had a good range—I bought a collection of Charlie Chaplin movies squashed onto a few discs, some other classics and the new release Gangs of New York. We haggled for a while, agreed on a price and I paid him. I went to leave, but the man stopped me. He waited until his friend had cleared everyone else out of the room and produced a smaller box of DVDs for me to browse. I took a look at the first title on the pile and my blood froze—I was looking at child pornography. I shoved the box at him and headed for the door. As I left the apartment building, kids were playing in the cobbled alleyway. I felt sick.

The people tasked with fighting piracy, such as Mike Ellis, the Motion Picture Association’s resident gumshoe in Asia, will tell you that organised crime syndicates—with links to much more harmful industries—are behind the pirate operations. That may be the case, but it doesn’t stop people from buying their wares.

Some believe the best way to kill the pirated DVD trade is, rather counter-intuitively, to let the trade in illicit movie downloads flourish. They may have a point. Take the case of ‘Tony’, a British pirate who made a fortune selling pirated DVDs in markets before the Internet killed his business. “Filesharing, P2P—call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn’t buying anything, nine times out of ten it was ‘BitTorrent this, LimeWire that’,” Tony told Torrentfreak.com.

Tech columnist John C Dvorak picks up the point: “I actually believe that allowing open file sharing to take place will indeed increase sales, and that people still like owning the real thing,” he writes in PC Magazine.

Dvorak reckons the entertainment industry should stop trying to close down file-sharing networks, giving people an easy and free alternative to buying dodgy DVDs. When the masses have gathered around a couple of dominant file-sharing systems, says Dvorak, the industry should spend up big buying them out and converting them to a premium model.

It’s an interesting theory, but one where the risk of failure in execution would be too much for the entertainment industry to stomach. Besides, when Napster went legitimate, it didn’t become a raging success—its users had already moved on to the next free sharing thing, BitTorrent.

Here’s another idea: make something new that people are happy to pay for. I’m not just talking about raising the bar on existing films, but developing a form of entertainment that’s intriguing—and hard to pirate.

What exactly am I talking about? Er, I don’t really know, but Peter Jackson might. His movies are staple fare for the Chinese pirates, but Jackson wants to create a new entertainment genre somewhere between gaming and movies. The good thing about online gaming platforms such as Xbox Live is that they are easier to protect through subscriptions and authentication systems that can be quickly updated. The director’s hands-on input into the King Kong console game is an early hint of the more immersive entertainment experience he longs for.

Jackson can do this; he’s not constrained by the self-interest of Hollywood or its fear of new media. In fact, perhaps any truly new innovations can only emerge from outside the Hollywood cartel. Why shouldn’t Wellington and New Zealand become the centre of a new kind of digital entertainment?

As we increasingly use broadband, it’s realistic that much of our entertainment will be delivered from central servers or legitimate P2P networks for a fee. But buying a pirated disc or downloading a digital copy of a movie may seem pretty disappointing without the interactive features a real-time server can provide. Exactly what those features are that compel people to pay is the Holy Grail for the entertainment industry. All eyes are on PJ.

Peter Griffin is a freelance writer with a Masters degree in screenwriting

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