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TIME Europe, July 1, 1996
China's CD Crackdown
Still, There's No End In Sight to Asian Software-Piracy Problems
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Like Pac-Man running amuck, Asian software pirates are gobbling up hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from American software companies. Total losses in 1994 added up to $4.4 billion. The issue has been gnawing away at relations between the U.S. and China as well, leading to threats of American sanctions against Chinese trade. So on April 29, in a historic blow
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Hot Wires Proposed For Korean Homes
New cable modems use standard cable-TV lines to send Internet signals into users' homes up to 100 times as fast as ordinary modems. But in some places that's not fast enough.
The next stage in bringing high-speed data lines to customers is fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC), full-service digital networks, according to a group of companies that wants to bring the service to Korea. Two joint U.S.-Korean ventures hope to win a contract with the Korean government to rewire about 10 million large-city households with fiber-optic lines that reach directly to the customers' homes.
The government wants to use the new networks to supplement existing cable-TV hookups with services like high-speed Internet access, interactive TV and video-on-demand products. In the economic boom under way in the Pacific Rim, that sort of agility may give Korea an impressive technological boost. |
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against software pirates, the Chinese government raided a huge factory that produced bootleg compact discs.
The Jin Die plant had a hundred employees who worked around the clock to produce more than 20,000 CDs (music, video and CD-roms) every day. This is the first time Chinese authorities have taken action against a company that makes illegal copies of commercial software.
But Jin Die turns out only a small part of the mountain of pirated software produced and sold in Asia. The Business Software Alliance, an anti-piracy trade association, reports that more than 30 factories in China alone produce almost 10 times as much illegal software as the country's total consumption of legitimate computer programs. "About one-third of our 1994 losses from piracy occurred in Asia," says Valerie Colbourn, corporate attorney for Microsoft in Hong Kong. The software giant provided Chinese authorities with the evidence that led to the raid.
Colbourn says that while Asian piracy is an ongoing financial drain on the world's software industry, it's also potentially devastating to Asian start-ups. "Small software companies, particularly in China, are developing new products and seeing them pirated at very high rates," she explains. "They're having a hard time fighting."
The Asian battle against piracy is comparable to the American war on drugs, Colbourn notes, because of the huge amount of money involved and the intense demand for the illegal products. The U.S. government is trying to persuade its Asian trading partners, particularly China, to crack down on piracy while they open their borders to legal trade. In a February 1995 agreement with the U.S., China promised to stop illegal CD production and open its markets to legally produced U.S. movies, music and software.
The American software industry wants the Chinese to raid more bootleggers and seize pirated software at the border before it can leave the country.
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