Moment of pirated Chinese DVD zen

Image: the cover of a pirated "Kill Bill" DVD in China with the headline "HERE COMES THE BRINE." BoingBoing reader Jon Rahoi says:

I'm living in mainland China for a couple of months. The dearth of English TV and the terrible quality of Chinese shows made me set out, on my very first day, to a local DVD store.

They're on every street. These people must listen to and watch a fair number of movies and CDs. But since the average wage here is, very roughly, US$150 a month, and the average DVD costs about US$15 back home, how can they afford it? Do they get a continental discount?

I walked in and got right to the discount rack. Dozens of American and foreign movies were on sale for 6RMB, about 75¢! The full-price ones ranged from 12-18RMB ($1.50 – $2.25.) Obviously, these are copies, fakes, pirate booty. But how good are they? For the sake of journalistic thoroughness, I bought 35 of them.

(…) The DVD cases are works of pirate art. They are all made in the same style from hard glossy cardboard. Cheaply made, but professionally graphically designed. They're so uniform, you can tell they almost all come from one maker. What makes them art, though, are the mistakes: made by a genius dyslexican who flunked the TOEFL. English literacy here is almost zero. A Chinese person picking up a movie to buy would not read the title, the quotes, the description, or the credits if they were in English. But any American movie case has to have English, right?

Here's a report on Jon's blog, Link, and here's another entry on the in-theater experience — "To The Chinaplex": Link

BoingBoing reader Charles Lin adds,

I lived in China for a short while, and the pirated DVD's tend to have OCR errors. How they got "brine" from "bride" is a horrid mistake, but especially when it comes to recognizing movie blurbs and the blocks of credits on the back, most of the errors don't appear to be typing transcription errors, but OCR errors from a scanner. Much of the box art doesn't look like the American version because it's scanned in from foreign posters for the movies, which often are of a slightly different design.