Seems like Nokia is going after some Chinese manufacturers alledgedly ripping off their design according to an article over on TMCNet.com (Link). This isn’t anything new of course. Everyone knows that design rip-offs are everywhere. It wasn’t long ago that news an entire corporation was pirated made the rounds and I mentioned it here (reLink). I raise it again only because there were a couple of recent articles that discuss the potential effects.

Yahoo News carried an AP story, “Piracy hurting China’s own industries” (Link), detailing how Chinese software developers are being hurt by their fellow countrymen. From the article:

Kingsoft Corp.’s English-Chinese dictionary program is used on most of China’s 60 million PCs. That’s the good news. The bad news: Kingsoft doesn’t make any money from it, because 90 percent of those copies are pirated.

One by one, the Beijing-based software maker has seen its sales of such popular products destroyed after black market producers flooded the market with cheap copies.
…
Kingsoft is far from alone. Rampant Chinese piracy of music, movies and software that raises howls of protest from the United States, Europe and elsewhere is hitting China’s fledgling creative industries hardest of all. Robbed of sales in their key home market, companies are short of money to develop new products to compete with foreign rivals.

One has to wonder how China will be able to continue it’s growth given the self-destructive actions inside the country. With China flooding the countryside and forcefully removing people from their land, polluting the country so badly we can only begin to imagine the long-term health impact on the population, or destroying their own industries with this sort of senseless behavior it’s hard for me to see a bright future for them. They seem to be adopting the worst of the West.

Meanwhile, in Russia (a bastion of corruption from all the reports I’ve read), piracy is booming. Hard to believe that Moscow is one of the most expensive cities in which to live. I guess someone is making money over there. And from another Yahoo/AP article, “Russia pirate industry is booming” (Link), it’s probably not the socially-minded piraniks cheering on the piracy clans and protesting DRM in the streets (as if there aren’t more important issues in the world):

“There are threats — all sorts of things. You get complicated moments, you get phone calls,” he said, reluctant to discuss an uncomfortable topic. Anti-piracy organizations have repeatedly stressed the link between organized crime and counterfeiting.

RAPO’s warehouse currently holds about $7 million worth of pirated DVD’s — enough to make him very unpopular indeed with the people who had hoped to profit from their sale.

Oh well. People are going to do what they want. But will they want what’s left after they’ve destroyed the incentive people need to create the things that are being pirated? Maybe the Soviet Union has won after all. We’ll all be enjoying the same drek together while a privileged few enjoy the jewels of civilization. History repeats.

Nokia story via Core77

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