Copyright infringement in Asia.

Copyright infringement in Asia is so common as to be the norm. It is, in some countries, in South East Asia, easier to find a fake item, than a real one. In Malaysia and Thailand, every item of kudos in the West, is found in cheap replica, there. Even in ever so clean Singapore, copied CDs and DVDs are not hard to find. It seems, in fact, that copyright theft is almost regarded as a right, by many businessmen.

Now, none of this surprises me, any longer. However, I was surprised, once, at what I saw in a Singaporean classroom. In a class of fourteen students, from China, and Korea, only three of them had official, legal, published copies of the course books. The other eleven had photocopied and bound, privately made editions. I found this most irritating when I noticed it. It irritated me because a lot of people had put a lot of work into making those course books - and they weren't going to see a single cent for their efforts.

What got me, in particular, about this act of theft on the part of the students was that it wouldn't save them much money. It would, perhaps, cost them half as much to steal the books, in this way, as to pay for them. Was it really necessary to go to all the effort to steal the books, at half the price? Why not pay the full price and get a real copy? The presentation and quality were much better for the real book - and no crime would have been committed.

Of course, stealing is a way of life for many of the students. Quite a few of them, for instance, try to "steal" marks, in exams, by cheating. (I have seen this frequently, myself.) I suppose stealing the books is just another aspect of their characters at work.

I wonder how much publishers lose through this particular student practice. Is it just restricted to Asia...or do students in other parts of the world do this, too? In this one class, only three sales were made and eleven copies were stolen. That seems to indicate that actual sales are but one fifth of potential sales, if this class is a typical one.

If anyone has observed this tendency to photocopy books wholesale, in other countries, please comment below.

Thanks.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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