Let's talk about piracy

[Mucuna]

I have a curiosity:

I'd like to know if in your country/region/city has a pirate game market and how is it.

I live in Rio de Janeiro city, Brazil, and in peculiar city centre's region is the "Popular Market of Alfandega Street". It is like 5 blocks large and it is crowded.

It sells anything (from diodes to gospel music cds; from sneackers to pirate games and (original) consoles.

As I said, it is five blocks large, cut by more than a hundred of narrow streets full of small stores (just the balcony - small to large ones).

A PS2, X-Box, Gamecube, X-Box 360, etc, DVD game is about 5 US dollars (an original game would be like 100 US dollars here).

The police division responsible for piracy control sometimes goes there, but when they are coming everything that sells pirate products just close the stores. The police can just force open the store with justice authorization. Raraly happens.

So, how is the piracy where you live, if it exists as a business?

 

[legendofphil]

If they sell diodes you best tell Sony, I hear they need a few.

There isn't so much of an area that is known for pirated material but the market stalls that are open twice a week have alot of pirated DVDs, CDs and games. They get closed down all the time but due to the laws here they have to gather evidence first before they can arrest someone for selling them.

I never bother with them because they just aren't worth it plus I can download it if I need to.

 

[Harsky]

I live in the north of Scotland. The nearest thing to pirace was when a person was selling a single DVD disk full of SNES roms in a school stall. But I hear it's much, much more rife in Glasgow bara area. I went to Hong Kong (this was before I heard about bittorrent) in 2004 and walked into one of those piracy stores where you choose a software, write the number and come back 10 minutes later. I came back 10 minutes later..... and all the shop owners got a tip off the police were coming and closed up. I lost £10 that day..... there were times were I feel tempted to sell bootlegged anime on ebay but that wouldn't be an honest way of making money.

 

[yuyuyup]

near denver CO, the ghettoish town 5 points has stands out selling bootleg VHS, CD, fake designer clothes, and KNIT PANTS, during events.

Knit pants, bitch.

 

[Samutz]

There's a store in Chihuahua, Mexico (I live about 150 miles from the city) that sells pirated music, movies (burned DVDs and VCDs), and PC games. All of which were about $3-10 USD each.
I haven't been back there in a few years though, so I don't know if it's still there or not.

Most of the movies were English with Spanish subtitles, others were Spanish dubbed. Some were DVD rips and some where recorded with a camcorder in a theater, for example my parents bought Matrix: Reloaded, X-Men 2, and Pirates of the Carribean while they were still in theaters in the US.

The games were mostly North American games with a handful of European/Multilanguage (with Spanish).

And the Music was pretty much Mexican/Spanish, but there were some popular US rappers too. But not really anything as far as rock or country goes.

 

[inter4ever]

Well here in Sharjah,UAE,we have a big market thats called the central market.It sells lots of things from clothes to jewels,and of course pirated games and modded consoles.Original games are expensive here(about 60$ for super smash bros. which is older thatn 3 years) while pirated games for ps2 and xbox are 2.5$ only!

 

[Mucuna]

BitTorrent...
There is some files I try to download with bittorrent that the max. rate is about 10 kb/s.

It is strange, because my normal download (from webpages) is like 60, 70kb/s.

I had some sucess in downloads with that tool, but there is files that simply is too big and too slow.

Is that with you too?

 

[x_comp]

I live in the north of Scotland. The nearest thing to pirace was when a person was selling a single DVD disk full of SNES roms in a school stall. But I hear it's much, much more rife in Glasgow bara area. I went to Hong Kong (this was before I heard about bittorrent) in 2004 and walked into one of those piracy stores where you choose a software, write the number and come back 10 minutes later. I came back 10 minutes later..... and all the shop owners got a tip off the police were coming and closed up. I lost £10 that day..... there were times were I feel tempted to sell bootlegged anime on ebay but that wouldn't be an honest way of making money.

Heheh, there's a lot less pirate stores in HK now compared to say 3 years ago. The Golden Plaza and Mong Kok area used have a full building with floors of pirate software, Anime, games etc. Now they're practically all gone apart from one or two people standing around who guide potential customers to a deserted building... I braved it to follow one along just to see what the place was like and it was pretty crowded. There's guys shouting to tell you to hurry up in case the police came along.

But anyway, with broadband so common and cheap now, the piracy business isn't as rife. You're better off subscribing to a broadband service and downloading

As for Glasgow, I haven't seen that many stores around although one little store close to the famous Transport Museum still opens now and then. Bring along a floppy disk and the guy copies a catalogue onto your disk for you or you can flip through the printouts there

Not sure about the Baras because I never go there and it's quite a dodgy area.

 

[FAST6191]

It would seem police have no other work around here (if I believe the bus stop adverts piracy will undoubtably be responsible for someone killing my cat) so piracy is not quite as brazen as some of the examples already given, it no doubt happens a great deal.

There are a few market stalls selling less than legit games although these are a bit rarer.
Normally though:

People will offer you stuff in a pub/your place of work (more often this is clothes/DVD's than computergames/electronics), place of work normally only extends to building sites/construction and car garages mind.

Computer fairs: I can not tell you how much piracy goes down here: most of the software is a high quality fake (you will probably need to compare a copy to an original, even more so now DVD cases are used as standard), friends and I have obtained countless boot discs (DC mainly) and "cheat" carts (PS1 mainly) as well as detailed guides. Discs of ROMs (and emulators) are not unpopular either although I find they are limited to the big 8/16 bit consoles.
While computer fairs around here are veritable treasure troves of such things they pale when compared to some of the ones I went to when I was in the US a while back.

Street level:
I already mentioned this and said it was not quite as prominent but I tend to hang around ports/docks (that sounded better in my head) so normally I will see a nice influx of DVD's and to a lesser extent (certainly nowadays) audio CDs from the ships original/visited ports, as an aside I am quite unsure how some of the DVDs end up looking as bad as they do (I would have to work hard to match the shear useless quality I see, I can not tell you how many times I have rolled up somewhere with my collection of DVD's I take around with me and people have been stunned that they can not tell them apart from a commercial one, or if I am really bored one day and remaster a DVD that it looks/sounds better than than store one).
Not such a frequent occurence nowadays but back in the PS1's time every fool and his donkey either chipped or knew where to go to get their console chipped, be it a friend or a store).

As for the internet we all know how that happens and it seems most have at least some knowledge of how it works (p2p, usenet, "rapidshare style" and IRC as well as ebay and its clones for those not taking score).

Edit: The typo monkey and my black ops team are in for an ecounter soon

 

[DownwardSpyral]

I live in the Midwest US, and piracy is pretty dull here. The market downtown has the occasional peddler, but everyone knows its pirated and the cops like to hassle em, so they don't make much. A week ago some guy outside my friends apartment tried selling me bootleg dvds.

 

[krad]

i live about 25 min outside of NYC. You can pretty much get anything on Canal Street in the lower east side. I was there the other day for the San gennero feast. But serisouly they have every type of purse, knock off. You could also venture to time square and buy from street vendors, but i have heard of to many people getting burned... they buy 4 dvd's and 3 would be blank dvds... You serisouly get what you pay for.

 

[zim_]

i live about 25 min outside of NYC. You can pretty much get anything on Canal Street in the lower east side. I was there the other day for the San gennero feast. But serisouly they have every type of purse, knock off. You could also venture to time square and buy from street vendors, but i have heard of to many people getting burned... they buy 4 dvd's and 3 would be blank dvds... You serisouly get what you pay for.

do they have supercards by canal street?

 

[Mucuna]

do they have supercards by canal street?

hehehe... I asked the guy of the market I told ya in the start if they would sell passcards. He just said "yeah, and the costumer never will return and buy again the games".

By the way, the ps2 pirated games here are really good in apresentation. Printed discs (excellent quality) and box with the covers.
EDIT: Oh, and they change if the dvd doesn't work and have a "fidelity card". Buy 10 games and you win a free one.

 

[krad]

i live about 25 min outside of NYC. You can pretty much get anything on Canal Street in the lower east side. I was there the other day for the San gennero feast. But serisouly they have every type of purse, knock off. You could also venture to time square and buy from street vendors, but i have heard of to many people getting burned... they buy 4 dvd's and 3 would be blank dvds... You serisouly get what you pay for.



do they have supercards by canal street?

i wasn't looking for nds stuff while i was there. I was loading up on fresh zeppoli, pizza and sausage! The probably do have the supercard.

I think when the ds-xtreme or the new prototype come out i will replace my g6lite. It has been working great, but i would rather use a microsd card and pop it in and not have to wait for patch updates and the like. Maybe i sell it real soon.

 

[Harsky]

By the way, at this point, I thought I might actually mention that there was a time when I was younger and had a little less brain cells that I actually tried selling DVD-rips in school. Yeah, you can guess what happened.

"YOU THERE. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DVDS? TO THE OFFICE"

After that, I stopped selling and instead, asked for payment in the form of borrowing DVDS so I can copy them with DVD Decrypter. Remember the Paris Hilton porn DVD incident? When that just came out, there were some that would say, "OH PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE CAN YOU GET IT FOR ME!"

I say, "okay"

Fast forward to the day after I gave the disc and when I asked what he thought of it he said it like, "er.... okay" in a way as if he was told Santa didn't exist.

 

[_ORiON_]

ha. even our malls have them pirated games, apps, and other softwares. also have 2nd hand phones (and they claim it to be sold to them, not stolen. XD )

i think once a month there are raids. but it's going nowhere. pirates always sprang up *again* the day after the raid. sheessh.

 

[Rangent]

I live in southern California, USA (right next to the Mexico border). Our piracy probably goes as far as getting burned CDs/DVDs made to look like real ones at the "swap meet" 30 miles south, but we're right next to Mexico where we can get all kinds of goodies you couldn't normally get (CDs, DVDs, mostly content for systems, I haven't seen the systems themselves).

However, there's torrents, Usenet, eDonkey, room mates, and the internet right here in my own house! Shameful.

 

[Psyfira]

Hardly see dvd and game piracy in my local towns. (well actually it's probably around but I think you have to know where to look). My area has the curse of 3 medium-sized high streets being too close together (they're all in a line so you can walk through all 3), one of which is considerably better than the other two. The markets were in the two less popular towns so got shut down from lack of interest.

The most noticable place I've seen game piracy is in foreign island tourist resorts: Majorca, Lanzerote and Tenerife. Seriously, the number of places looking to offload fake GBA games to holidaying parents is amazing!

[Edit] That's a good point, most people in this country do have some kind of internet connection so the pirate DVD and CD trades probably died a bit in favour of free downloads.

 

[Bitbyte]

We don't really have any such shops around here. There once was a shop in some other, quite close, town where you could get your psx and later on ps2 modded, but they got busted. They had like +2k pirated games over there

. Also, there was some guy in my town that got busted for selling pirated games, they found around 3000 DVDs in his house, most of them pirated PS2 games =P

 

[-KangaRod-]

I'm in south Japan, and other than my EZ Flash IV, I've never seen anyone hawking pirated stuff. The only person I know with a hacked system is my buddy who got his xbox modded in Canada before he moved here.

Now even with that said, the other day I was in the book store and bought a magazine that is clearly about hacking the DS (it explains how to use passcards, where to find roms, where to find EMUs etc etc) but I can't understand it, cause its in Japanese.
I also met another buddy, and got him to buy a DS and EzFlash IV for him and his buddy.
I hooked him up with all the roms (that he promised to buy from the store, as soon as we finished). He seemed to cream his jeans, so maybe I will spread the "backup of all legally owned games on a single cart" disease that seems to be rampant everywhere else in the world.