When anti-piracy people talk about places like China, they say stuff like "the industry lost 300 billion dollars worth of business to china last year". That's total bullshit. Maybe people in china paid 1$ each for their dvds, and bought maybe 15 billion of them, it's true. But if they were priced at 20$ each, no fucking way they would have bought that many. In reality, Hollywood lost almost no business, because nobody in China is dumb or rich enough to get raped buying a 20$ DVD.

It's the same when they talk about how much business software piracy cost the industry last year. No way those college students had money to buy all the games and mp3s they downloaded.

If you count what should be the true goal of governments - setting things up so their citizens end up happier, with more opportunities and better lives, then China's piracy policy is awesome. Instead of nobody having dvds there, everybody's got tons. The average Chinese person with a dvd player has 10 or 20 times as many dvds as an American. They just have whole drawers full of them. That's the benefit of all the work we fucking did creating cheap dvd copying! we should be enjoying it like they do!

A thought experiment - do you think that if china did give hollywood all the money it deserved that they would actually produce better movies? no. they've already got enough money to make almost any movie they want. more money isn't going to help anyway.

It should be the same with medicine - americans pay for it, the rest of the world gets it free.

Man, if I were an african country I'd infect the US with malaria. THEN they'd see some goddamn money devoted to the worst disease in the world.