I am curious about something that came to my mind recently and that is, in China is it possible to pirate and how?

About China I only know about the firewall and little else, so before I say something idiotic or something that sounds very ignorant, I’d rather you enlighten me.

  • Hillock@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Yes it’s possible. Their version of Google Drive (Pan Baidu) is basically a paradise for piracy. But it’s a bit of a pain in the ass for foreigners to get access. And obviously everything is in Chinese.

    China doesn’t care about foreign held copyright. So anything that isn’t owned by a Chinese company is fair game. As long as it isn’t considered banned material of course.

    • Aatube@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      BaiduYun’s a paradise to host pirated content but not to download. The free tier fucking limits you to double digit KBs per second and the Chinese government will arrest you if you create a script that simply uses aria2 to circumvent that (contrary to many of these Chinese arrest rumors this actually happened).

    • Xirup@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      Interesting, thanks for the information.

      It reminds me that I had read that Russia doesn’t care about foreign copyright either, and it makes sense.

  • borat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    If I’m not mistaken the Chinese torrent trackers goes offline several days in a year. The police “fight” with piracy but the trackers are tipped off before the operations so that copyright holders can be mitigated by doing that.

  • Corroded@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Here is a Kotaku article titled Bootleggers Explain Why There’s So Much Video Game Piracy in China. It is from 2013 and I think there has been a size amount of legislation changes but it sounds like the grey market for video games was thriving thanks to console mods.

    I could still see it existing today considering you do occasionally see someone selling drives full of pirated games. It might be a more local sneakernet style of system.


    Good question though. I love hearing and learning about how piracy works in other countries.

    • Xirup@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      A good read no doubt, it really makes it clear why piracy is and was often a necessity, not only for those who can’t afford to pay for something, but also those who live in an authoritarian regime. I wonder how Lin and Yu would have fared after the ban was lifted.