Boing Boing has a great posting on DVD cover art for pirated DVDs in China. What is most fascinating to me is how the economics and social acceptance of pirated DVDs has become so widespread. According to some Chinese nationals that I have chatted with, DVD sales are on nearly every street and the discs are of “professional” quality for a little less than a dollar each!

Essentially the DVDs are straight rips of the American films with Chinese subtitles added. Since English is not the native language of the people involved, the inevitable typo or mistranslation crops up like this “Here comes the brine.” With such a good product available for such a good price, what can the entertainment industry even do to challenge this situation?

I ask this question because recently the MPAA has become obsessed with shutting down internet filetrading. I believe that trading movies and music online is indefensible. According to our current version of copyright law it is illegal and no amount of debate can change that. However, since the invention of recordable media there have been people willing to rip it off for profit or for the mere enjoyment of sharing something with their friends.

However, the MPAA is misguided if they think that the greatest threat to major film studios are crappy quality, low-res Divx files shot of a shaky digicam in a theater. One day soon, hard drives will become so cheap that people can swap entire studio back-catalogs on a chip the size of a stamp that costs nearly nothing. This is the kind of piracy we are looking at when we talk about places like China. DVD technology has made it economically feasible to sell identical quality movies at a ridiculously low price without the loss in time and quality that piratng over the internet presents. Perhaps the Asian mafiosos that dominate the piracy industry don’t have a large foothold in North America but with the price of storage dropping like a rock they won’t be needed.