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The other countries that appear on the list are China, Russia, Algeria, Argentina, Canada, Chile, India, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan and Venezuela.
The U.S. 2009 Special 301 Report referred to Thailand, saying in part, “Thailand will remain on the Priority Watch List in 2009 due to a broad range of continuing concerns surrounding IPR protection and enforcement. The Thai government made little progress over the past year in addressing the widespread problems of piracy and counterfeiting. The United States is encouraged, however, by the positive statements made by senior Thai officials in Prime Minister Abhisit’s administration.”
However, Thailand – known for positive statements but a lack of follow-up action – is not likely to implement meaningful intellectual property legislation any time soon. This is not only due to government ineptitude, however.
While working as an editor with a well-known law firm in Bangkok, I recall some of its lawyers saying they would not bother buying legitimate software for several hundred dollars when the same software, with a dozen or more other applications on a single disk, was available for as little as US$3.00.
The flip side of the copyright coin is rarely illuminated by the guardians of legitimate software retailing because it does not reflect well on industry kingpins such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune is somewhere between US$40 and $80 billion dollars, depending on how it’s calculated.
The cost of software made and marketed by Microsoft and others, particularly Abode, is only around US$3 a disk on Thailand’s black market. There is no comparison with the actual retail prices advertised by these manufacturers.
A single multi-program Adobe disk contains 28 programs; they retail at around US$100 each, but sometimes cost up to $500 or more. Retail price for this disk would be $2,800! Instead, it’s sold all over Thailand for $3. The manufacturing cost to pirates is likely to be as low as ten cents, or a dozen disks for a dollar.
As long as this gap exists, there is no hope to wipe out copyright infringement in the world’s less affluent economies.
Copyright infringement notwithstanding, it is nearly unimaginable that the owners of these programs have such huge costs that they cannot manufacture the same copied software for as little as 10 or even 100 times what Thai or China-based pirates are doing. A disk with the same 28 programs should not cost more than $30.
Why can’t software manufacturers take the same route as their counterparts that make shoes and clocks and jewelry and all that other Wal-Mart-style China-made stuff that Americans buy? These industries went abroad to hire cheap labor in cheap factories so they could multiply their profits while still providing reasonable prices to consumers. Why do software manufacturers not do the same and cut the prices of their products to a reasonable level?
It makes no sense to squeeze a little online thief who downloaded a dozen or more copyright-protected songs by getting “the system” to fine him over US$600,000, which he will never be able to pay, as occurred recently in the United States.
Originally, piracy meant “an act of robbery on the high seas.” Pirates – usually from the poorer classes of society – took away wealth from the upper-class merchants, with few moral qualms. It seems today’s pirates feel the same way.
On the other hand, today’s legitimate software manufacturers seem to see themselves as riding the high seas of international consumerism, with the right to market products for huge multiples of their costs and to threaten those who don’t follow their self-serving rules.
In a globalized society – where charlatans, liars, even killers and self-deluded political icons can run nations and twist complicated issues – the entire issue of software piracy should be examined by a commission that has access to manufacturers’ production data. In this way avarice would surely be revealed.
It would be nice, for example, to hear Bill Gates explain why disks that number in the millions, all copied from a single program, need to cost as much as US$500? With industrialists like this, do the rest of us really have a chance?
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(Frank G. Anderson is the Thailand representative of American Citizens Abroad. He was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer to Thailand from 1965-67, working in community development. A freelance writer and founder of northeast Thailand's first local English language newspaper, the Korat Post – www.thekoratpost.com – he has spent over eight years in Thailand "embedded" with the local media. He has an MBA in information management and an associate degree in construction technology. ©Copyright Frank G. Anderson.)
As to my car, if you find someone able to replicate it at the fraction of the cost (in the thousandths and millionths) such as Microsoft and others charge for their software) you are more than welcome to try. These false syllogisms that pretend to hold logic are merely poorly thought-counter arguments that would fail in court.