Piracy as a public service in China

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Piracy as a public service in China

I’ve heard plenty of reasons as to why piracy is so commonplace in China. The most oft-suggested theory is that piracy is accepted in China due to the fact that copying art was a highly-regarded form of, well, art in China for quite some time, perhaps it still is.

Apparently, there’s a subtle joke about this in the new movie Kung Fu Panda, as Andrew Leonard noted recently:

Finally, he comes to a painting depicting an ancient exploit by kung fu heroes. He exclaims: "I've only seen paintings of this painting!"

My kids laughed, as did most of the theater, just because the line sounds funny all by itself, without any context other than that delivered by Jack Black's voice. But taken in the context of classical Chinese painting, it's an even better inside joke. For many centuries of Chinese industry, the great paintings of the past were faithfully copied by the great painters of each successive age. The earliest versions of many of these classics have been lost to the ravages of time -- we know them only through their reproductions.

Yet those reproductions are not regarded as mere copies, but as masterworks in their own right. Indeed, there is even a theory that the supposed Chinese lack of respect for copyright can be connected to the classical Chinese reverence for copying. "I've only seen paintings of these paintings" is a joke written by someone who knows what they're joking about, and it is not the only such gem in "Kung Fu Panda."

I tend, though, to draw a line between pirating software and movies and copying paintings. The latter requires extensive training, while the former requires a computer and some spare time.

Well, okay, maybe it requires a little more than that to pirate the latest season of Lost. At least, that’s what I find myself wondering after listening to this story on NPR today about various aspects of DVD piracy in China.

My first thought (and I assume the thought of anyone else reading this who has lived in Asia) was that the idea of people being in the dark about this is kind of funny. Piracy of television shows and movies is the norm. Just go to tudou.com and search The Office, for example.

At the beginning of the story Laura Sydell visits a student named Yao who is a big fan of Lost. Yao says that he likes “American culture” and that he would like to “live that lifestyle.” He also says that Chinese shows are “pretentious.”

(Side note: Why does the American media always get people with strange voices to dub over people speaking in foreign langauges? This seems to happen quite often: while you hear the person speaking the background, someone with a nerdy voice and a fairly strong accent says the English version of what’s being said in the foreign language. Couldn’t they just as easily translate the quotation, then get a native speaker to read it? Does the accent add effect?)

Later in the interview, when Yao is asked about the governments censorship of the Internet, he says that he doesn’t care that he can’t look up information on Taiwan or Tibet. However, if the government were to do something to curb his ability to download of Lost, there would be trouble:

"If they tried to stop those Web sites ..."

He interrupts himself.

"What if we all started to boycott all Chinese shows?" he asks. "That would be a huge loss — and we think this is our right. We have the right to choose what we want to watch."

Sydell also goes and talks to two of the people responsible for the voluminous pirated files available for download. It was quite interesting to hear about the process of getting the shows from American TV to Chinese downloading websites:

Download the original file from (I’m assuming) an American file sharing client. This, he says he can do within ten minutes of the show’s closing credits on American TV.
Search for a close-captioning script of the show.
Translate. “We’re not just making subtitles,” he says, “We’re making better subtitles.” As an example, he shows that instead of just translating the name of Robert E. Lee in an episode of Heroes, he also provides a footnote saying who Lee was.

This is the part of the interview I found the most interesting, though:

Han says there are about 200 translators who work in his group. They're located all over China.

Liang Liang organizes the group and helps make sure each new show has translators assigned. Among the translated shows posted on their Web site, YYeTs.net, are American Idol, Prison Break, Gossip Girls, Survivor, The Moment of Truth and Battlestar Galactica.

Liang, Han and all the other translators are volunteers. The group even puts its own money into maintaining the site.

"We are a nonprofit organization," says Han. "To some extent, what we do is a kind of bridge for two different cultures."

Although they would not give me their real names or meet me at their homes, Han and Liang say they don't think they are doing anything illegal.

In fact, they could face fines if caught. But the chances of getting caught are slim.

I never even considered the possibility of this being such an organized operation, mostly because some of translations are quite shoddy. I’m amazed to find that this is a network of hundreds of translators who see themselves as providing a service for humanity.

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