Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes is trying to figure out what the hell is happening in China. One of the interesting things was the ability to go buy a loaded Lenovo ThinkPad for about $800 and then
load the operating system and software you wanted at a discount price. The counterfeit was very cheap, but the software makers had in fact lowered their prices enough that Adobe 7 was generally about 12 RMB, a roaring $1.50. Windows was about the same. Now, the government is requiring that computers be sold with at least the operating system loaded. Interesting.
One of my colleagues in the China endeavor that I occasionally get roped into (not hard) theorized that China would begin to protect intellectual property when it saw a benefit to itself in so doing. The only thing I can see this doing is raising the price of the computer; if the local equivalent of a ACER A was $200 before including monitor, it'll probably double in price. Again, not sure what they gain -- however, the Chinese do take a longer view and they are definitely concerned about the potential freedom that the web and digital communications present. I am intrigued -- if this is a way of reducing access to the web by making it more expensive to get on-line, then they are definitely far, far ahead of our chumps who seem to be unable to get anything more sophisticated than opening the door to get a coke and a pretzel entirely fucked up.
The other possibility is that China has some intellectual property of its own to protect. Don't really see it, myself...pirates of their movies and cartoons? Primarily bootleggers and counterfeiters are Chinese, including possibly the People's Liberation Army. They did get very upset about the pirating of their Olympic Mascots...the Friendlies. I like them, and I find most mascots for events pretty useless, obnoxious and saccharine. We'll see...
By the way, they are BEIBEI, a fish; JingJing, a panda (and kind of the Alvin of this band of chipmunks); HuanHuan the Olympic Flame and kind of the leader; YingYing, a Tibetan antelope; and, NiNi, a bird. The first syllables in pinyin (Chinese written phonetically) spell Bei-jing Haun Ying Ni, or Beijing welcomes you. Insidious...
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