Putting a Stop on Pirated CDs

Chan Ching Bun

Pirated copies of VCD, computer games and software have been very popular in the past few years. Although much effort has been put in by the police and the customs, people still get pirated CDs easily. People prefer illegal CDs to the original ones because of their low prices. However, it is the marketing of illegal CDs that leads to the high prices of the original ones.

People get pirated CDs through several ways. Firstly, some authorized CD producers produce illegal copies of the CDs and distribute them to the market. When the customs and police come to investigate, the owner will just show them either the real certificate of authorization that they get from the original company, or a fake certificate. Secondly, the production of illegal CDs is done in mass production. The producers smuggle them into cities in the mainland such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou. People often travel to these places and they can buy the pirated CDs easily. Thirdly, people nowadays often have a CD writer at home. They can thus copy the original CDs and be able to distribute them among their friends.

However, due to the low quality of illegal CDs, it is quite common for people watching illegal VCDs to miss some precious scenes. As for those who buy illegal copies of software, they always find that some system files are lost making it impossible to run the program properly. It might even damage their computer systems. It is also possible for badly produced CDs to inflict damage to the CD-ROM Drive.

Since people who produce illegal CDs need not do any developing or research, they only have to pay for the price of the blank CDs which may cost as low as a few dollars. But they get huge profits by selling them at about twenty dollars each, earning five to seven times the cost price. Therefore, it is not fair to judge the original VCDs or CD-ROMs as too expensive compared to their pirated version.

The production cost of VCDs, for instant, comprises the salary for the actors and production team, cost of the equipment and the site, and the expenses of late production and advertising. For computer games and softwares, the salary for the programmers, the production team and the cost of marketing and packaging add up to a big sum. These can be as high as billions of HK Dollar. When compared to illegal producers, the profit that a software company earns is much less. It is, in fact, the illegal companies who are cheating peoples' money.

The popularity of illegal CDs greatly increases the pressure on these companies. They need to increase prices to compensate for the loss in customer. Otherwise, the company will not be able to afford the production costs and quality of products will fall, eventually resulting in the closing down of the companies. Moreover,
buying and selling illegal CDs is illegal. We should be able to distinguish between right and wrong after we have received so many years of education.

The price of some local films' VCDs has also been reduced greatly. The reduction has shortened the distance in terms of price between pirated and original versions, thus the original copies are actually great bargains for their copyright and quality.

Recently, Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world, has noticed the harm of the illegal marketing of CDs. In response, it recently started
offering discounts up to seventy percent for some of its popular software titles like Office, Windows and Frontpage in a special promotion offer for teachers and students.

To conclude, people tend to think that illegal copies are cheap and economical. But now that even Microsoft has started to cut prices for us, there is absolutely no reason for us to buy illegal copies. So, from today on, stop buying low quality illegal CDs and switch to the new generation of not-so-expensive but high quality genuine copies. I am sure that we will see further price cuts if more people do change to genuine copies.