US pirates 150 Chinese movies

Let’s talk about the serious problem of movie piracy. Specifically, American piracy of Chinese movies. According to a Beijing Youth Daily report, 150 movies from twenty Chinese studios are being offered for free download from American websites.

In addition to the 150 movies, the sites also provide links to “CCTV’s Spring Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival variety shows.” There’s apparently pirating of physical VCDs and DVDs going on in Europe and the US as well. No links, unfortunately, though if you’re in China you shouldn’t need them.

The Chinese movie industry responds with typical bluster:

On 29 August, the China Movie Copyright Protection Association was founded [out of several professional associations]. Chairman Zhu Yongde said that the after the founding of the association, it had done much work to strengthen copyright protection of movies, and the particulars of this infringement had been discovered just two months ago. “Although there’s a firewall and the websites can’t be seen domestically, outside the country they are browsable. Compared with piracy at A/V shops, this has a much broader reach and our losses are thus much greater.”

There was a memorandum signed in July of this year among the Ministry of Culture, the SARFT, and the MPAA that provided a mechanism for conducting meetings and reporting piracy conditions every three months, but it specified no actions to follow in the unlikely event that piracy were discovered.

At the latest meeting on 25 October, MPAA representatives were “satisfied” with improvements in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, but felt that there were still “serious problems” with shops in Beijing.