No great surprise that I really enjoyed reading Adam Minter's piece in Asia Times (also on his Shanghai Scrap blog) about piracy and pricing of Western theatricals in China. I have written and talked about this topic ad nauseum and will most likely bring it up again next week in the IP law class I am teaching.

Minter has no qualms about going right after the Motion Picture Association:

[U]ntil recently the MPAA and Hollywood have appeared determined to treat mass Chinese demand for low-cost versions of their products as an affront, and not an opportunity. Instead of figuring out a way to compete with the pirates, they've spent resources complaining to Washington.

As an IP lawyer, I am supposed to sit back and commiserate with the IP owners and moralize about all the piracy going on out there. Well, I do that most of the time. However, I also live in the real world and understand that sometimes lobbying and complaining in the face of technological changes can be a losing proposition. And when an industry fails to come up with a way to meet those challenges (e.g. lower prices), tough new IP laws and enforcement mechanisms can only take you so far, although certainly a lot more can still be done in China.

Minter's conclusion is an extremely good bit of writing, and I hope to get the chance to use this sentence in the future:

If, as seems likely, Beijing intends to continue dragging its feet on piracy, Hollywood is faced with two choices: compete or complain.