More World Cup fallout: fixed games and anti-piracy

Because there’s no football, but people still want news.

(1) How to stop movie piracy (from the Mirror): The market for pirated films has suffered during the World Cup season. A report in the Mirror say that the latest blockbusters for sale at stores in Beijing’s big pirate movie districts are holdovers from the beginning of last month. Ice Age 2, The Poseidon Adventure and 16 Blocks are still on the shelves, while new movies like Click and Superman Returns are essentially unavailable on disc, even after a week or more of showing in theaters.

Chinese films, too, are hard to find. B-movie Crazy Stone and Xu Jinglei’s latest, Dreams May Come aren’t in stores yet, and the Sino-British co-production The White Duchess isn’t selling well at all.

The culprit is the World Cup, apparently. According to a clerk at the Guomou store, because customers are expected to watch football instead of movies, the storeowner didn’t order any new films this month. The Mirror reporter only visited 10 DVD shops, so your mileage may vary.

(2) World Cup scandal exclusive (from Metro Express and China Daily): France paid Brazil 25 million euros to throw the quarterfinals, according to a report running in papers across the country. The original article in Tianjin’s Metro Express cites an “astounding internal email” from a French source shortly after the team’s victory over Brazil that read in part “The Brazilians have taken compensation from the French that exceeds the winner’s trophy prize, so they’re now very cautious.” The reluctance of Brazil’s stars to conduct post-game interviews is explained not as disappointment at being sent packing, but as anxiety that the secret would get out.

They didn’t count on China’s intrepid army of evening papers and urban tabloids, however. Word is out, and China Daily has picked up the story (crediting its version to the Jinan Times). It is currently the only English-language source of scandal rumors indexed in Google News. Is this the break China’s investigative sports media needs to give it respect on the world stage?