an article here on rewards they are offering for ratting on manufacturers of pirated goods here in taiwan. articles like this always make me suspicious. especially when i read lines like these:

About half of all music CDs sold in Taiwan are pirated.

or

Taiwan is a major producer of CD duplicators and CD-Rs and nearly all of these are used by pirates.


both are attributed to robin lee(secretary general for the IFPI taiwan). but the first is not in quotes and the second is. when i see lines like these, i always wonder how do they know half of all music cds sold in taiwan are pirated? where are the statistics on this and how did they come to that conclusion? did they poll every shop and ask "what percentage of your cds are pirated, and how many did you sell?". i realize the paraphrase says "about", but i'd like to know what this is based on. and for the second quote, are they implying that anyone that buys a cdr is a pirate? that would make a large number of computer owners pirates.

granted, movie bootlegging is a problem here. but often the bootlegs are of rather low quality. i heard that the boot for the second harry potter film had really poor chinese subtitles. so bad in fact that it was like watching a completely different movie. the few times i've seen boots like these, it has been for a movie i didn't really want to see in the first place, or one i wasn't sure i wanted to see. more often than not it convinces me that it's not worth seeing in the first place. maybe if they lowered the prices on dvds, vcds and cds they wouldn't have such a huge pirating problem.