I just got home from Beijing where I spent the summer at an Intellectual Property Institute at Tsinghua University Law School. On the first day, our International Copyright Professor told us that “information wants to be free” but there are a bevy of laws and treaties to ensure everybody — copyright holders and potential fair-users — get the appropriate piece of the intellectual pie. Then we broke for lunch. I wandered down to the Lotus Center, a kind of vertical Wal-Mart just outside the university campus and was surprised to find they had — all shrinkwrapped in what looked like a little DVD boutique, the new Harry Potter movie that had just opened in the US a few days or weeks earlier. The cost was 10RMB or something like USD 1 and some change. I didn’t get one because half the people in my class had them and were having screening parties in their rooms before class started. Most were of dubious quality and one of them just shut down right near the end. Black screen. I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of the counterfeiters or not, but it was technically an excerpt and if you want to know how the movie ends, you still have to go see the legitimate movie and pay the appropriate and correct parties for the privilege.
Which brings us to the madness that swept the English speaking and ex-pat community in Beijing who were up at dawn on July 21 to get in line to pick up their copy of the new Harry Potter book. In China you can get your Harry Potter book in three flavors: US cover, European Cover (and a bit smaller) and European Adult Cover (more “adult” looking and smaller type). The cost is about 218 RMB, which isn’t bad but the book weighs a ton, as Potter fans already know and I did have my preordered copy from Amazon waiting on my doorstep in the US. So as much as I wanted to read it, I knew I didn’t want to drag the book through three airports on the way back home.
But the story doesn’t end here, as you know. A friend of mine who could care less about things Potter, happened to mention that the paperback version of Harry Potter was already out in China. Wow. Where? On the street outside of our favorite ex-pat student burger joint near the campus.
And sure enough. For a mere 50RMB (but I hear you can bargain down to 40 or maybe 35 if it’s late in the day and really really hot) you can have a nice paperback version slapped together probably in some dingy sweatshop somewhere in Northern Beijing. And I admit, I had a look, although I pretended I wasn’t looking. I looked at the rest of the counterfeit books on the dealer’s wagon — including one of the sorriest mis-translations of Bridget Jones’ Diary I have ever seen. I can only imagine — well no, I really can’t imagine what teenage girl with a few years of English under her belt translated this copy after answering and ad in the back of a newspaper. Or similar. The Potter book is well bound, but the paper is rough and who knows if the ink could survive a water spill or the turn of a page. And after paging through other pirated English language books, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would be reading a) a reliable translation with b) the actual plot. China’s lone English speaking news channel CCTV9 was running breathless stories about those evil counterfeiting bastards selling fake Harry Potter books in India and Malaysia and mentioned that the book would come out in China –in Chinese — later this year. The implication being that there are no counterfeit copies to be had on the mainland. No sir. Everything on the up and up here.
And as they were speaking counterfeit copies were being snapped up all over the country.
Perhaps most amusing to Americans used to those “copy this movie or CD and we’ll hunt you down like the dog you are and kill you — or at least sue your grandmother for infringment” messages we hear from the MPAA and the RIAA is the wild west atmosphere of all this. Even the official Foreign Language Bookstore was selling copies of the movie right there in the store alongside the legit copies from the US and the EU.
This whole episode makes all of us who grew up in the age of the digital download think twice. Sure, information wants to be free and quite frankly I’d like it to be free but these fake books remind me of the muddy, low-fi songs that filled the old Napster directory that ultimately filled my computer with more spyware than great music. Somebody owns the rights and that person deserves to get paid. Maybe one day far, far away from now (if JK Rowling ever runs out of heirs and assigns, which is probably doubtful) Harry Potter will be in the public domain, but even lovers of free information think copyright should extend at least one day longer than the original publication date.