Beijing Letter: Faster than a speeding X-Wing fighter and sharper than a flashing light sabre, China's pirate DVD vendors were out on the streets of Beijing selling top-quality rip-off DVDs of the latest Star Wars film even before the credits had finished rolling.
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith could be had for €1 in one of the scores of shops selling pirate DVDs scattered around the city or from one of the legions of vendors who peddle their shrink-wrapped wares from bulging shoulder bags in the tourist haunts.
"It's very good quality," said the saleswoman in the DVD shop near the city's embassy district, proudly brandishing Star Wars III. The Chinese government restricts the number of foreign films allowed to screen every year in an effort to protect the homegrown film industry, and also for censorship reasons.
Film fans usually have to wait months for foreign blockbusters to hit the screens in China, but Beijing censors have lately been speeding up the approval process - a tactic aimed at beating the pirates by letting audiences see the movie in the cinema before the copiers can get the pirate DVDs on the street.
This didn't exactly work with George Lucas's latest effort, which opened on Thursday in Chinese cinemas in a simul-taneous launch with picture houses around the world.
Identifying the bad-quality DVDs straight off, the saleswoman in the embassy district went on to point out various other new titles available, including Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (not great quality) and the latest Ridley Scott epic, Kingdom of Heaven (very good quality).
She told me to wait a week or two for better copies to come on the market.
Quite a bargain, too. The Star Wars movie, and the other early summer blockbusters, were on sale for 10 yuan, less than €1, and were indeed of good quality.
Generally the copies are made from videos shot in the cinema or from screener copies given to distributors and other industry figures.
Watching the spectacular opening battle in space in Star Wars III, there were no signs of the bobbing heads or audible popcorn munching that shows the film was shot from the back of an auditorium on opening night.
The disks are packaged in covers designed by the pirates, occasionally to hilarious effect - the recent Greek epic starring Brad Pitt was called Tory instead of Troy.
The fact that English is still not widely spoken in the pirate community is further evidenced by the use of reviews of the movie culled from magazines or newspapers.
The sleeve of the movie Levity, featuring Morgan Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton, tells the potential purchaser that the film "takes itself too seriously" and is "heavy-handed".
For a while last week it looked like the heady days of pirate DVDs at knockdown prices were over.
The illegal DVD shops were all closed as Fortune magazine was holding a high-profile public meeting in Beijing, which had plenty of bigwigs from US companies who would not have approved of widescale piracy on the streets.
Also the World Intellectual Property Organisation was meeting to discuss the piracy issue.
So the shops were shut.
Counterfeiting is widespread in all areas of life in China, not just movies. Some people say it's because China is a Confucian society, which believes imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Rip-off clothing with big-brand tags is widely available in the stalls and shops around the city.
The once-legendary Silk Alley market, near Beijing's diplomatic compound, closed recently, and fans of the fake Tommy Hilfiger and Nike clobber feared an end to the cheap knock-offs from the stalls.
Silk Alley was reborn as a brand new shopping mall, but inside the stalls it's business as usual for counterfeit goods, though perhaps not as prominently displayed as before.
Pfizer has launched legal action against China's Patent Re-examination Board, which is part of the State Intellectual Property Office, for wrongfully invalidating its patent in China for the use of sildenafil, which is the active ingredient in the anti-impotence drug Viagra.
The government recognises that it needs to do something, however. Beijing has made many public statements about getting to grips with the fakes and even staged an anti-piracy week last month.
There were nearly 10,000 prosecutions for piracy last year. Last month a court in Shanghai jailed two Americans for selling 180,000 pirated DVDs on internet auction sites.
Time Warner Inc's home video subsidiary began selling cut-price DVDs last year and sold hundreds of thousands in the first month, but the pirates still have a strong hold on the market.
While it's hard to put a price on the value of the piracy market, there about 100 million DVD and VCD players in China and, with a pirated copy selling at around €1, and with hundreds of disks per player, the total is surely enormous and foreign firms are constantly moaning about lost revenues.
But in a country where the rural daily wage is 80 cent, there is little general sympathy for the concerns of multinationals about the devaluation of their brands.
