According to the information on www.mydrivers.com, 94% of the people use pirated media in China. It makes it in the top three in the world. The pirated media include audio CD, Video CD, DVD movies, game CD’s, Game DVD’s software CD. This situation brings some advantages and disadvantages to china. Today, I want to talk about these two sides in my own point of view.

Mostly, the big pirated market gives China four advantages. China has 0.5 billion population so there is a huge pirated media need. Due to the incredible demand, many of the unemployed can find a job. This is the first advantage. The second advantage is pirated media has made a lot of distributors rich. For example, one pirated DVD movie only costs CA $0.50, but the sale price will be CA $2.00; therefore, each DVD can earn CA $1.50 profit. Using all kinds of software is the third advantage of pirated media. Original software is very expensive for the low salaried Chinese. It’s easy to understand why people don’t like to spend their whole monthly salary to buy one piece of software. The pirated media solves this problem. The forth advantage is the pirated media industry improves technology rapidly. Many Companies focus more on protecting their products so it is not as easy to make pirated copies as before. Only people who have high skills can destroy the protection of original software and make a copy of it. That’s why Chinese technology increased very fast during make pirated media. Here is one good example can prove china really has the high technology now. Xbox is a game system produced by Microsoft. Microsoft is a software company which has high technology to protect their products. The first chips for playing pirated games were invented in China.

In my mind, I can see there is a significant amount of advantages that are brought to China by the pirated-media industry. On the other hand, I also want to mention some disadvantages. Nobody will buy original software because of the cheap price of pirated media. The pirated movies are released too quickly causing the theaters to always be empty. A lot of companies don’t want to open in the Chinese market because of the huge pirated market. Nobody buys the original media causing the original media industry to shrink.

Overall, the pirated media industry brings more advantages to China than the disadvantages. Maybe in the long run, the damage will become clearly. But from this period of time, the pirated industry gives a lot to the Chinese: more people get jobs, many people become rich, people can use all kinds of software, and increased Chinese technology. Finally I want to say this situation not as bad as people said because it really helps Chinese development.

August 2002