At a crowded night market in Taipei, vendors blare techno music or yell at the top of their lungs to draw attention to goods ranging from oyster omelettes to clothes to furry puppies.
But at one stand, a rich collection of pirated Hollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong pop music and Japanese soap operas lies unattended on a wooden table.
No vendor is in sight. A handwritten note asks buyers to drop their money in a white plastic box. A counterfeit disc costs as little as US$1.50, compared with US$9 for a copyrighted one.
The nation's CD pirates are slipping into the shadows, no longer daring to man their stalls, fearful of getting caught as pressure from the US forces authorities to step up their anti-piracy campaign.
"The government has finally recognized that this is a serious problem, but drastic and speedy measures must be taken to solve it," said Hank Kwuo (
The US will decide in coming months if the country should stay on its 301 "priority watch list" of the world's worst copyright offenders for a third year in a row.
A decision against Taiwan could lead to trade retaliation from its second biggest export market.
That danger does not worry the pirates, although the threat of prosecution has made them much less brazen than they used to be about selling their wares.
And the more careful strategy is working.
Exasperated prosecutors say to make a case, pirates must be caught red-handed and even then crafty vendors, many of whom have links with crime gangs, often escape the law.
"A man caught selling fake CDs in a night market managed to persuade all the other vendors on his street to testify in court that he was only a fruit seller," said one prosecutor who declined to be identified. "He was freed. It's very frustrating."
Stories like that do not help the central government as it tries to safeguard its precious political and trade ties with its most powerful ally, the US.
Washington considers Taiwan one of the top three sources of counterfeit compact discs, along with Brazil and Russia. The US entertainment industry and software companies say Taiwan pirates cost them US$756 million last year.
But that is of little concern to most residents, many of whom are happy to enjoy some bargains as the nation's once-sizzling economy crawls back from its worst recession ever in 2001.
It is little wonder nearly half of music and movie CDs sold in Taiwan are counterfeit when most blockbusters are available in markets long before cinemas that charge US$7 a ticket.
"Do you have any idea how expensive it is to take the whole family for a movie? Do you know how much a copyrighted CD costs?" said Chen Pei-sheng, a 36-year-old father of three, as he flicked through a stack of discs at a market.
"The economy is weak and I don't earn much. These suit me just fine," said the salesman, puffing on a cigarette as he picks up a copy of the latest James Bond thriller.
Pirate CD production has dealt a severe blow to the local entertainment industry. Losses recently forced a cinema in central Taiwan to shut down and others are on the brink of bankruptcy.
"The technology in Taiwan to make pirated optical discs is second to none in terms of quality and quantity," Kwuo said.
Hollywood's Motion Picture Association says piracy in Asia has evolved into highly organized mob operations.
Local authorities say they have yet to substantiate the claim of links to organized crime but say piracy is difficult enough to handle even without the crime gangs getting involved.
Justice Minister Chen Ding-nan (
"In the past we were poor but things are different now. With per capita income of over US$12,000, the government has no reason to tolerate piracy," Chen said.
"If people can't respect other people's intellectual property and copyright, they won't be accustomed to abiding by the law."
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts