Pirated Optical Disks in Hong Kong
“Hong Kong is one of the most blatant and obvious piracy centers in the world,?Kevin Henshaw, chairman of the Hong Kong branch of the Business Software Alliance, which combats piracy, said in 1997 (Woo 7). Hong Kong joint ventures are on the United States Government hit-list of 29 pirate CD (compact disk) factories (Ball). Industry officials said that most of the pirate compact-disk factories in China are joint ventures with investors from Hong Kong or Taiwan who cleverly sought partners among the relatives of officials of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (Shenon I-3). ... Although China is the biggest pirate disk manufacturer in the world, which accounts for about half the pirated disks produced in the world every year (“Codes?, Hong Kong played a crucial role in China’s pirate disk industry from production to market. Hong Kong people play as the middlemen getting the orders for the Chinese as well as marketing the goods. Hong Kong has been the destination of millions of Chinese-made pirated disks each year. A vast number of pirate CDs has been flooding the Hong Kong market. Hong Kong, a tiny city, had been surprisingly been the leading pirate disk producer in Asia after 1996, and even was the biggest pirate disk producer in the world in 1999. ... The executives in the music, movie and software industries cited as evidence the large pirate CD production capacity in Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau and Nip 2 Malaysia, much of which was added only recently. The four locations had an annual production capacity exceeding 550 million pirated CDs between the year of 1996 and 1997, according to industry estimates (Warner). ... According to Giouw Jui Chian, the Hong Kong-based regional director of IFPI, Macau and Hong Kong, in particular, have seen a surge in pirate CD production capacity. ... Hong Kong, especially, with a capacity of 330 million pirated disks and 29 pirate CD factories alone, had topped the production capacity among the other three Asian countries (Warner). While in 1999, Hong Kong had seen the sharpest capacity increase, from 600 million units in 1998 to 2 billion units of pirate disks, leading the pirate disk capacity in the world (“Music? ... Ironically, there were only 300 million units of legitimate optical disks demanded in 1999 (“Music? According to a report on piracy by the IFPI, in 1998, there had been a number of seizures of massive quantities of illegal disks, bringing the reported global total for all disk formats to at least 60 million units (“Music? ... Of these seizures, the most notable was in April 1998, when 22 million disks were seized in a single action in Hong Kong, with a further 18 million disks seized during the rest of the year (“Music? ... With an estimated US$60 million worth pirate disks, Hong Kong was one of the countries who were rated at the first level of domestic piracy, which meant the countries where the levels of domestic piracy were excessively high (“Music? ... Why is the pirate business running so well in Hong Kong? ... Given that a typical factory can produce 200,000 disks a month for US$1 profit on each disk (qtd. ... With the aid of proprietary recording equipment, the Nip 3 counterfeiters simply transfer the digital information onto blank disks. ... The counterfeiters use a seemingly more effective economy of value of pirated products. ... People buying the pirate CDs blindly without any regard for intellectual property are usually motivated by the cheap price, fast-release and high quality of pirated CDs. ... For instance, the official market price of computer CD-ROM software ranges from a few hundred to a few thousand Hong Kong dollars (from about a few ten to a few hundred US dollars) while it is available at the pirate CD stores at HK$100 (about US$14) for three items of any software (Woo). ... Nip 4 Besides the extremely low price of pirated disks, the release time is also a key to the popularity of pirate disks. Regularly, Hong Kong movies are released at theaters first for mid-night shows and available for golden daytime and night-time shows a week later. ... For the impatient as well as ungenerous Hong Kong people, it is an opportunity to watch a new-released film with a cost much lower than a movie ticket, and the video CD can be played back whenever you want and as many times as you want.