China Cracking Down on Piracy

One of the reasons that the PC gaming market has flourished in the Middle Kingdom instead of the console market is, of course, the rampant electronic piracy in the region. While it may be easy to bootleg an actual game disc, if the game requires a fee or a registered account to play--well, those are harder to forge.

The Chinese government, though, is initiating efforts to crack down on the piracy throughout the region, as reports The Escapist Newsroom.

Facing pressure from the world community, the Chinese government now claims to have shut down 8,907 shops, 942 websites and 481 publishers during a 100 day campaign against piracy. "We are giving shopkeepers a stern lesson to make it clear that selling pirated products will lead to strict penalties," said Liu Binjie, vice director of the State Press and Publication Administration."

It's interesting to see Beijing cracking down on piracy, and I don't doubt that it's at least partly due to the efforts to "clean up" in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games. I do wonder if perhaps electronic piracy is too deeply entrenched in the region, though--from my experiences in China, it took significantly more effort to track down a legal DVD than it did to purchase a bootleg one, and I can't imagine it's all that different in gaming. I'll be intrigued to see the results of this 100-day crackdown, but I honestly doubt it'll do anything more than briefly dent the efforts of those wacky software pirates.