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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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).
Interesting, thanks for the information.
It reminds me that I had read that Russia doesn’t care about foreign copyright either, and it makes sense.
And by extension, North Korea?
Watching foreign movies is illegal north korea. They might not care about the right holders, but they certainly care about not letting their citizen watch foreign movies.
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.
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.
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 🤷♀️
