Hong Kong’s pirates continue undaunted

Press, 13 May 1986, Page 24

Hong Kong’s pirates continue undaunted

A battle is being waged in Hong Kong between the software and hardware pirates on the one hand and the Customs and Excise department — closely supported by the Anti-piracy League started by Mr Jodee Rich, of Imagineering in Australia and Hong Kong — on the other.

At the moment it looks as if the pirates are falling back in disarray and the men in the white hats are winning. This is a false impression.

There is no doubt that successful prosecutions are taking place, fines are being imposed, pirated goods are being confiscated, but this does not mean piracy has stopped. It has not even gone underground.

There are several reasons for this — reasons why Mr Rich faces a long haul before his dream of a piracy-free Hong Kong comes to fruition.

e There is great difficulty in making arrests. When the customs and excise men raid the Golden Shopping Arcade

— the centre of all piracy in Hong Kong and possibly in Asia — all the stall keepers in the threestorey complex are given distant early warning, as the posse thunders up the narrow staircases, by a loudspeaker system which announces in Cantonese to the effect that the men with the pointy hats and big boots have arrived for the day, so close up shop, smartish.

All the shopkeepers take heed and then retire to the Dai Bai Gong — the open-air eating stall — in nearby Fuk Wa Street, to have yum cha and wait until the customs officers have left. In two. raids in March, the 70 customs officers involved averaged only one arrest for every 10 officers — not an encouraging ratio. The rest of the shops were closed and shuttered by the time the customs officers got there, and the law is uncertain about the rights of men from the customs to break in. So they do not.

All of those arrested immediately pleaded guilty and awaited their fate with seeming indif-

ference. • The judiciary does not take the crime of commercial piracy as seriously as others. Apple’s resident in Hong KOng, Mr Larry David, thinks the offenders should be stuck in jail. The fines for the offenders netted on these two raids ranged from SNZIO to SNZIBOO, which the offenders considered part of the normal overheads of doing business in Hong Kong. It is true that in a recent case, the felicitously named Up Fine Software Company was fined a sum totalling more than SNZBOOO, but this is the exception rather than the rule. • The business community in Hong 'Kong simply does not view piracy as a crime — unless it directly concerns them. There has been some amazing correspondence in the local English language newspapers complaining, in effect, that the copyright law merely allows software producers to make unwarranted profits. The question has been asked why a serious literary work, beautifully printed and excellently

bound, should only cost a tenth of the price of a software program. Whether these arguments have any merit is beside the point. The fact that they are being advanced shows the entrenched attitude of the business community in Hong Kong is not totally at variance with that of the pirates. Recently I went to Shamshuipo, to the Golden Shopping Arcade, and talked to a shopkeeper about the effects the raids were having on his business. Although I was wearing a dark blue suit, a short haircut, a white shirt and was speaking some Cantonese — ever the sign of a feared member of the forces of law and order — I was offered pirated software and computers by the gross.

As I talked to the storekeeper, two policemen were signing the book at a police reporting station within the arcade itself.

They appeared singularly unmoved by the evidence of piracy and fakery around them. As the shopkeeper said to me, “It is just business as usual.”