Ordinary Gweilo

Interesting story in the SCMP this morning, about the approach taken by film distributors on the mainland to pirate DVDs. Infernal Affairs III was released last week, and pirate DVDs were available a few days later. So rather than whingeing about it in the SCMP they did something positive:

Just three days after cinemas began screening Infernal Affairs III, they have flooded Beijing shops with DVDs of the police thriller – hoping to beat pirates at their own game.

“It is our strategy to fight against the piracy by flooding the market with authentic and legal products at an extremely low price,” said Ouyang Xinpeng, media manager for the Guangzhou-based distributor Zoke Culture Company. Big-screen hits including Infernal Affairs II, Warriors of Heaven and Earth and Running on Karma have been fast-tracked to film vendors by Zoke Culture in the past six months.

“Our products now occupy about 70 per cent of the market, as opposed to 60 per cent for the fakes in the past,” Mr Ouyang said. “We lost profits from them all, but we believe that all this effort is worthwhile to squeeze fake producers out of the market.”

A very sensible response, I thought. The only thing that surprised me was that they are pricing them quite so cheaply. I’d have thought that they could have charged a little more for the genuine article, but perhaps this way guarantees that they beat the pirates.