Piracy in China

Early this year, Microsoft won a Chinese court case over pirated software used by a local insurance company. This lawsuit was Microsoft’s first against a large Chinese company for copyright infringement involving its software. For years, the pirated Windows system in China is sold for 5 RMB for each copy and it works well, but the legal copy will be more than 3,000 RMB. This totally gives Microsoft a punch in the face. However, software privacy is not the most serious problem in China now, rather, it is the DVD or music piracy.

Piracy has been a serious problem in China for a very long time (maybe long enough not to be regarded as a problem anymore). Chinese government has had a very tough and never-win battle with piracy. So, who is responsible and whose fault is it?

To those customers,

The cheapest price for a laptop in China is less than 3,000 RMB which equals to the price of a legal copy of Windows (not included in MS Office which is about the same price as Windows). The totally cost of software will be much more than buying a laptop; however, it is unacceptable according to Chinese people’s philosophy. Moreover, if one’s laptop is attacked by virus, it is very convenient and easy to reinstall Windows system by a pirate copy.

Another situation is about DVD or music in China. The average price for the movie tickets in China is about 60 to 90 RMB while the illegal copy is about 5-10 RMB (if download from Internet, it will be free) and the quality is usually very good (DVD-9 format or even Blue-ray). Additionally, due to the censorship in China, there are tons of good movies not allowed to be on show in theaters. It seems those pirate DVDs are the only access to those movies or music.

To those street vendors,

If you take a walk in Shanghai at night, you will find those people carrying a big black suitcase, standing in the corner of the street. And if you walk close to them, they will ask you if you want some illegal DVDs or software. I thought before that they made a lot of money by standing there all day but I was wrong. After talking to one of those vendors, I knew that they only earn less than 1 RMB (about 15 cents US dollars) for each DVD they sell, and they have to stand in great sunshine in the summer and strong wind in the winter all day. However, now in China, there are more and more DVD stores. It is really interesting, because almost all the DVD stores have a back room where you can find thousands of pirated DVDs and CDs. If the police come, they just close the door to the back room, so easy!

To those pirated DVD providers,

This group of people seems to benefit most from the piracy market. Their knowledge about pirating is updated enough; once there is a new movie on show no matter wherever in the world, less than 10 days later, there must be pirated DVDs in street. Also, no matter how software companies even Microsoft build passwords or keys, they can always figure out how to break them. Their capability to do this is totally based on the demand of customers and domestic market in China. However, the interesting thing is neither do they get a lot of money from this business. Some of them even volunteer to do this risk-taking job.

To Chinese government,

Chinese government has put tons of endeavors to crack down piracy market; however, as I said before, it is a never-win battle. March 15th every year in China is the Anti-Piracy Day. On that day, there are lots of news reports on TV about the local government burn fake clothes or crack thousands of illegal DVDs. Nevertheless, I wonder what the point to have these reports on show is, they change nothing!

Piracy problem in China is nothing but a dilemma. No doubt, piracy hurts a lot people and business, however, if it is completely cracked, more people will be hurt. How to find a solution and what the solution will be seems very difficult to predict!

Beauty in Diversity

Iwabuchi’s article on “Taking ‘Japanization’ Seriously” discusses the concept of mukokuseki, which literally means “something or someone lacking any nationality” (Thussu 2010). This refers to the erasure of racial – ethnic characteristics and removal of cultural context that is often seen in Japanese animation. The characters depicted then cannot be attributed to any particular country or culture, although they often tend to carry more Caucasian features. The lack of cultural odor in animation partially contributes to its popularity worldwide, as there is little that is outwardly distinctly Japanese about this particular cultural product. Although the Japanese are the main consumers of anime, animators refrain from portraying characters that are distinctly Japanese, or even Asian, so that their product will appeal to a broader audience outside of Japan. Although the fan base for Japanese anime is greater in East Asia than in Western countries, the fact that creators of anime cater to western audiences is very indicative of American cultural hegemony.

This has resulted in a shift in standards of beauty worldwide to reflect that which is considered to be beautiful in the western world – namely light skin tone and hair, round eyes, a slender but curvy frame for women, and a brawny athletic build for men. It is obvious that these particular characteristics do not reflect the majority of the population globally, nor were these considered to be the standard of beauty before the advent of globalization processes. I believe that the cultural hegemony that has resulted in valuation of these features as being most desirable is the same force that has made cosmetic surgery to adopt more western features (ie. double-eyelid surgery) so popular in countries such as Korea and Japan. In regards to the anime world, animation director Oshii Mamoru posited that “Japanese animators and cartoonists unconsciously choose not to draw ‘realistic’ Japanese characters if they wish to draw attractive characters” (Pshii, Ito, and Ueno 1996). For me, it is a shame that this devaluation of non-western physical characteristics has been subconsciously adopted by so many, because I think so much beauty is found in our diversity.

File sharing “flow” and IPRs

When I lived in California and the Internet was taking off, Napster and the lawsuits that shut down its model of free sharing of MP3s set off a lot of debates in my circle of musician and filmmaker friends.

Some of them thought that music should exist in a public space, where the information (music, film) was accessible (free) in the public sphere. This anti-copyright law movement reflected a desire to keep all media available to everyone. One of my DJ friends initiated a project where he asked composers he knew to make pieces that used samples from Beck. Since Beck bases so much of his music on samples already, it was a comment on the use of samples and how music should be made available to the public sphere.

For some of my other less experimental music friends, who rely on royalties to pay the bills, sharing music in the public sphere without compensation becomes more contentious. Sure, it makes sense to have your music up in sample form for people to get an idea of it. And I heard an excerpt on NPR (see link) last week about big hip-hop artists making long form albums that they release online for free, which the record companies allow because ultimately the publicity will, maybe bring more record sales. So, while the artists do share their music for free, their goal is also to make money through exposure.

And now with the peer-to-peer sharing sites such as Swedish company Pirate Bay and the torrent points technology, people can make downloads without being tracked easily. Pirate Bay has been shut down a couple of times and are in court this week appealing charges about IPR infringements and answering questions about making child pornography sites available. They argue that they do not post the content, and if they find a torrent that is not legal, they report it. They essentially don’t take responsibility for content since the users make the torrent points.

Siochru and Girard address the debate over Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in the chapter, “Introduction to National Media Regulation,” from Global Governance: A Beginner’s Guide. The Pirate Bay case is a good example of how it is hard to govern some of the media forms online because it is hard to find who owns the content, or who placed links to another person’s content without permission.

I don’t think that making media accessible should translate into making people’s work available for free. Obviously people need to be compensated for work. But when people get used to all the free content, who pays the content creators? The smaller, independent projects, unsupported by studios or labels (or Universities) represent diversity and need to be funded in some way. The structure of how royalties are paid out definitely favors the bigger studio and network supported artists.

ASCAP (one of the music composing rights organizations in the US) pays royalties based on what networks and less funded stations such as PBS can pay. So, if you write the score for a film that goes on PBS that is high quality and took 3 months to do, you will maybe pay for some groceries. If you write silly music for the background of a show on a major network or a cable show, you get paid a lot more. The producers of the shows on networks (and PBS) submit cue sheets to ASCAP and pay the fees. Since PBS is so underfunded, they can’t afford to pay as much. The same idea applies to radio stations (which is why most radio stations lack diversity in the music available).

The Internet opens up many other opportunities for musicians to gain exposure, and for music consumers to get choices! I think the whole transformation on the music industry (that is in the beginning stages) will ultimately place more of the governance and regulation of music media into society. This will mean more diversity and plurality in the music available.. For now, the regulation is still balanced toward the industrial, where governments and other bodies work with existing IPR laws and other aspects of the media as related to the economy.

Eagle Eye

One of the thing Siochru and Girard point out in "Global Governance: A Beginners Guide," is that one side of societal regulation is whether "the state has the right to intervene in and access the private transmission and communication in the general public interest. The balance of privacy and the public good is relevant to all media but is topical in the area of Internet encryption and whether the state should in principle be allowed to intercept and interpret encoded messages.”

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported on an effort by the Obama administration to push through legislation next year that would subject internet services ranging from Skype to Blackberries to be required to and have the technical capability to 'wiretap' its users if served with such an order. "The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year," states the article, "raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation."

The United States is not the first country to consider the bill, nor are these potential laws as strong as some of those that already exist in other countries. For example, the Indian government demanded earlier this year that Research In Motion, the company behind the Blackberry phone, develop software that would allow the government to decode encrypted emails and transmissions and display them in an easily read format. They have also warned that they intend to extend that decryption to other email and web-based services as well. The overall concept of both laws is that terrorists and other people who are potential security risks are increasingly using the internet and other digital means of communication to make their plans and plot their plots.

A key question here is the debate over what is being sacrificed, and who should get the final say in this level of technological regulation, as in both cases the order is coming down from on high. As the first New York Times article notes, this move by the Indian government will likely have the possibility of scaring away business. Gone are the confidential memos, the back door deals, and behind closed doors mergers; once a public entity is given free access to the keys of the kingdom, it's pretty clear that someone will have an easier time of snatching them away and getting into places they're not supposed to be in. Considering the illegitimate and inappropriate activities corporations will pursue in order to get the leg up on their competitors, it opens up a whole new black market for information, and would likely increase the rate of data mining, technological sabotage and new and creative computer viruses. The imposition of this law would not completely remove the element of secrecy from business deals, it certainly would severely handicap them; after all, one could never be sure if one was being watched.

It has also been argued that those in government are also not the best equipped to understand new technologies, much less regulate them. Several examples of this include the 1930 senate resolution to ban the dial telephone from the capitol building, to former Alaska representative Ted Steven's questionable understanding of the internet despite his leading role on a committee to regulate the issue of net neutrality in 2006.

As Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation states in the first New York Times article, “We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.” Of course, these nation-states find themselves under somewhat legitimate potential security threats in a world where their enemies, as individuals and small groups are adapting quicker than the establishment. The question is whether the establishment can adjust their security procedures effectively, and what kind of impact a broad-ranging security bill like the one due next year will have on other aspects, particularly economic of the country and government.

Google vs. censorship

Tuesday's New York Times editorial about Google's Transparency Report service really resonated with me in the context of our class discussions. Google Transparency Report has two components: Government Requests and Traffic. Governments Requests tracks requests that Google receives from governments "for the removal of content or the disclosure of user data," while Traffic shows "whether or not [Google] services are accessible in a given country at a given time." A few key excerpts from the Traffic FAQ page (emphasis mine):

We believe that this raw data will give people insight into whether or not our services are accessible in a given country at a given time. Historically, information like this has not been broadly available. We hope this tool will be helpful in studies about service outages and disruptions and that other companies will make similar disclosures.

Interruptions in our services can have several different causes, ranging from network outages to government-mandated blocks. When the service is inaccessible for an extended period of time (beyond what is standard for a network outage), we investigate and draw conclusions based on the number of users affected and information we receive from local ISPs.

Not only is Google exposing repressive governments, it is also using its position as uncontested market leader to encourage other companies to do the same. I expect that moving forward, we're going to see some very interesting mash-ups from nonprofits, activists and scholars using this real-time map of digital oppression. Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, came to US at the age of 6 as a refugee from the USSR, and is deeply committed to human rights, freedom of speech, and internet freedom. He is also, by virtue of his position at Google, among the most powerful people in the world and certainly in the IC field. In that sense, he is a bit of an anti-Murdoch, choosing to use his considerable powers for good rather than for evil (I am revealing my biases here). Born in 1973, Brin is only 37 years old, and is definitely a big player in IC to keep an eye on.

Another interesting point is that Google does not permit hate speech in Blogger (see the Terms of Service). If Google receives a complaint about hate speech on a Blogger-hosted site, and deems the content to, in fact, be hate speech, the company takes the offending content down. There are a number of other restrictions, including prohibitions on child pornography, violence, crude content, copyright violations, distribution of malware, spam and illegal activities. Interestingly, Google frames its "content boundaries" as a necessary measure to preserve freedom of speech. As we discussed in class on Tuesday, this is the same reasoning behind the voluntary rating systems implemented by the film and broadcasting industries in the United States. It is also interesting to note that Google permits adult content on blogger, but requires it to be labeled as such so that it can be filtered out by parental control software.

Piracy in the 3rd Degree

After years of being subjected to a crusade against illegal downloading and file-sharing within a university setting, it was constructive to receive a different perspective on the issue through Mattelart’s article on piracy as a cause and effect of cultural globalization. He examines the use of piracy not for its criminal implications, but as a form of dissent against government-regulated media and as a way for the “have-nots” to access the same cultural products as those in major industrialized nations. While piracy is rampant in developing nations as well, since people will never cease to apply their ingenuity to “beat the system” and avoid having to pay for a product, the figures estimating corporate losses seem misleadingly large compared to the total income and net worth of these multinational, horizontally and vertically integrated corporations.

Mattelart astutely draws a connection between the development of the informal economy of piracy and the failure of governments and international organizations to provide access to cultural products. His statement “while piracy has connected Nigerians to ‘the globalized world, it does so by emphasizing [their] marginalization at the same time’, a marginalization which is reflected in the pictures marred by interference and scarcely audible soundtracks” indeed summarizes the state of affairs in cultural, technological, and information access in the developing world. Therefore, I feel that rather than attempting to eradicate piracy – which I think is impossible—a step towards more long-term corporate profitability would be to assist in ICT development efforts in Third World countries and the possibility of further opening these emerging markets. The ICT revolution will not happen overnight, but if standards of living are increased and the “have-nots” eventually have more readily-available access to information and international cultural products, media conglomerates will stand to profit from access to these markets. Piracy will never cease to exist, but perhaps given the option people will choose to obtain these legally, as their hands are tied from doing so at the moment.

Something about Nonverbal Communication

Being a part of intercultural communication issues, nonverbal communication also occupies an important place in our everyday life. However, what is the exact definition of nonverbal communication? According to Wenzhong Hu, nonverbal communication is a means of communication without words, including hand gesture, body gesture, facial expression, body contact and body distance. Basically, nonverbal communication consists of send-outers, receivers, culture, and environment.

The first problem comes to that how culture influences nonverbal communication. Similar to verbal communication, culture stands in an absolutely dominant place in nonverbal communication too. Culture and nonverbal communication influence each other mutually at the same time. Understanding the cultural background should be the cornerstone of running nonverbal communication smoothly. Culture and nonverbal communication are inheritances of countless generations; they are social habits decided by history and tradition, interwoven and influence every aspect of social life subconsciously. Nonverbal communication is the result of a long-time cultural acquirement.

Nonverbal communication consists of a wide range of contents and lots of scholars have tried to make catalog about it; however, at a point of view of intercultural communication, we can classify it into four catalogs in general. They are body gesture, vice language, objectifiable language, and environmental language. Body gesture includes people’s movements, hand gesture, facial expression, and body contact and so on. Vice language consists of taciturnity, switching of topics, and sounds without a specific meaning, like most of the onomatopoetic words. Objectifiability language includes decorations on body, such as jewelry, perfume, make-ups, as well as cars and furniture. Etc. Environmental language consists of spatial information, time information as well as sounds, lights, and different kinds of signs around.

The content of nonverbal communication diverse a lot, and in most circumstance, it is used with verbal communication at the same time. It is in very rare occasion to run nonverbal communication alone. By repeating, stressing, making complements, the aim of the words becomes clearer and clearer, and the effect of the communication becomes better. For example, when welcoming someone, we usually reach out our hands with a smiling face; when we feel dissatisfied with something, we wrinkle up our foreheads and shake our heads; when we are telling others that something is on the table, we point at the table itself. Nevertheless, in some occasions the content of verbal communication and nonverbal communication carries an opposite meaning. For instance, if a person is freaked out by something, he or she may pretend that he or she is at ease and says “I am OK, I am fine”, but his or her body and voice trembles all the time; if a boy breaks his arm in front of a girl, he may say “it’s nothing”, but he covers his arm with another hand tightly with his face turning pale gradually.

In the following content, I will show some specific difference in nonverbal communication among different countries which is very interesting.

1. The difference in choosing time for visiting or dating.
Usually, Chinese people feel like visiting friends on weekends or during holidays, because when they get together, they usually have dinner which takes a long time. However, people in America or Europe do not like visiting friends or being visited on holidays, they regard holidays or weekends as very private time which should be spent with families, so they usually keep company with them, having a trip or doing some cleaning at home rather than hanging out with friends. They will be very unhappy if being invited or visited.

2. The difference in smiling habit in different cultures.
People here smile a lot, even to strangers, which is seldom seen in China, and to people in Russia, they always feel Americans smile inopportune or inappropriate; on the contrary, people here always feel Russians are too cold and detached because they seldom smile. American people consider the expressions on listeners’ faces as very important response to what they are talking about, so they want to see different kinds of expressions, such as exciting, astonishing which indicate that the listener is intrigued by the conversation; however, Chinese people hide their emotion a lot, they seldom show exaggerate expressions on their faces. Although in some cultures, direct eye contact is impolite or threatening, people in the U.S. like looking directly into eyes of the listeners when they are talking, if they cannot get the eye contact, they may feel they are not attractive enough or listeners do not like them. On contrast, Chinese always avoid eye contact in order to show respect, politeness and subordinating.

3. The difference in some hand gestures.
When Chinese people make wishes, they close their hands in front of their chest, while Americans and Englishmen cross their index finger and mid finger to say “wish you good luck” or “I hope so”.
Russian people put their hand in front of their neck in order to tell they are full after dinner and cannot eat any more, which means chopping off one’s head in Chinese culture. However, in France, people raise their hands to the space between mouth and nose to indicate they are full while Canadian put their right hands up above their foreheads.

4. The difference of hand signs.
In America, raising hands above head and clapping suggests the victory and the pride of the war, which means friendship in Russia. When President George Bush visited Australia, he thumbed up at the airport to show his satisfaction about his trip which caused hug disagreement in Australia because this gesture is of wretched appearance in Australia culture. Chinese and Japanese Usually scratch their heads and make “si…” sound when they are confused. However, this gesture will never be understood by people from European countries, when they see this, they get confused themselves.