The use of pirated software in China is really quite a sizeable loss to our software producers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The amount of piracy is extraordinary. People don't realize how big it is.
Piracy is a huge, huge issue for all of these major content companies, and everybody has a different way of addressing it.
Piracy has destroyed the domestic market.
When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn't like.
Corporations have been killing the risk-taking and exploration that makes software great. They have tried to rip the soul out of development.
If you are extremely well known and have a very desirable product, then yes, you probably do suffer a bit from piracy, in the same way that if you make a lot of money, you pay more in taxes than if you don't make any money.
China's Web has grown away from just duplicating services from the U.S.
As a student in Beijing in 1996, I sometimes marveled at the sheer obscurity of the movies that somehow made it onto pirated discs in China.
Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.
In short, software is eating the world.