Is China unfairly bashed on piracy?
Posted by Tim Johnson Thu Nov 8, 9:59 PM ET

Read the media these days (my reports included), and you’re likely to believe China is a world champion violator of piracy laws. Is it possible the media have got it wrong?

That’s what a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego says. He’s written a 24-page report that essentially says China, taken as a whole, is not the leading global pirate. When figures are adjusted for population, China's rates of intellectual property violation are lower than those of many other countries, including the United States.

Schwabach says the media and U.S. politicians are prone to China-bashing. He then examines figures on international movie piracy provided by the Motion Picture Association and compares those figures to the populations of the countries involved. The report concludes that the problem of movie piracy is more severe in the U.S. than in China, possibly because of greater broadband access, and more severe still in other countries, including France, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
As Schwabach points out, much depends on how one calculates losses from piracy. For example, if a consumer buys a pirated version of Wild Hogs, the John Travolta flick, would he or she also have paid full price for the legitimate version?

“Many who might have been willing to pay 60 cents for a pirated DVD of the mind-numbingly awful conclusion to the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy would have been unwilling to pay $22 for a licensed copy, or $11 per person to see the movie in a theater — or would have demanded their money back if they had.”

Same goes for music, Schwabach argues, and China’s per capita piracy rate is actually quite low.

“The figures provided by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a recording industry group, probably overstate the actual cost of piracy, but place the per capita level of pirated recording sales (in China) at about one-third of the level in the U.S.”
So even Mexico has a far higher rate of pirated music recordings than China, he says. China’s per capita theft figure is $0.68 while Mexico’s is $6.53.

Elsewhere, Schwabach argues that some of the worst piracy occurs in the West, but escapes media attention “because it is online and thus less visible.”