:: from “shanzhai” iPhones to the Shanghai Government bootleg edition of Windows XP, knock-offs and intellectual property violations are a part of life on the Chinese mainland. The below five-point brief provides some context to how Chinese netizens use the Internet to find, download, and share bootleg / pirated content.

why bootleg / pirate content online in China?
A few years ago in China, if you wanted to watch a movie you could go to the nearest supermarket, where a guy with a cardboard box of DVDs would be standing outside the front door. You’d rifle through the collection and pick out a selection of titles that caught your interest, and then go back home and see which ones would actually work in your DVD player. But with increasingly speedy Internet connections in China today and the wealth of content available online, why pay for pirated DVDs of uncertain quality when you don’t have to? More and more Chinese Internet users are no longer turning to the “the DVD guys / shop on the corner.” Movies are just the tip of the iceberg – music, TV shows, animation, games, software, and magazines are all easily available online for free. Sure, there’s something called “copyright law” which makes downloading this content slightly against the law, but everyone else is doing it, and when the government mandates the use of software despite allegations that it contains pirated code (see the recent Green Dam debacle), it makes you wonder how seriously any of this really is. Software piracy has been dropping over the past few years, but is still quite high: According to a BSA survey, China’s piracy rate for software was 80% in 2008, down from 90% in 2004. Arguments can be made that software piracy hurts the domestic software industry, and the same argument could be made for bootlegs in other sectors. But the combination of easy + free makes bootleg information very attractive to China’s netizens, obviously.

what can you pirate online in China?
VeryCD provides a searchable archive of digital information and content along with an active community of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharers. It doesn’t host any of the files itself – instead, it links to files that allow netizens to download bootlegged content from other netizens. The front page of VeryCD prominently features movies and music, but the site indexes a wide range of materials. The categories listed in the sidebar are movies, TV series, music, games, animation, art, software, and “resources,” a category that encompasses anything from instructional DVDs to PDFs of magazine scans. One of the things that VeryCD brought to file sharing was a charter for sharing mp3 collections. Titles, format, tags, and packaging were all standardized, and the idealistic goal of the site’s “MP3! Project” was for “every individual to share two or three albums to establish the largest mp3 music library in the P2P world.” Because the eMule system (see below) does not have any central file repositories but relies on users themselves to share files, participants in the “MP3! Project” are requested to share a few albums long-term so that they’ll always be accessible to other netizens in search of them. Xiami is a music sharing platform. The website provides a substantial archive of music for online listening through Xiami.FM, a music widget, but it also offers Shark, a P2P application designed for sharing music libraries with other Xiami users . Users who download and install the software achieve far better speeds on future music downloads, and they can broadcast songs they possess that are not present in Xiami’s own library to other users. Kugou is a similar service that has been around for years, and there is a wealth of smaller services around as well. A number of services have arisen to serve movies and TV shows over P2P services. Poco’s movie channel and PP365 are two examples; each requires installing a proprietary piece of software that handles the movie download process. There are, of course, legitimate uses of this technology – streaming authorized television programs or movies for which permission has been received, but, it safe to say, that doesn’t make up the majority of use.

how do you pirate online in China? ::
P2P software – an application that transfers files to a netizen’s computer from the computers of other netizens directly, rather than pulling content  from a central location – is frequently used for sharing pirated data. The files indexed on VeryCD are shared through the eMule program, and the site provides its own version of the application: EasyMule. The software registers its own protocol (ed2k) with the users’ web browser so that links to resources are automatically passed to the eMule program, which then searches for the content on other users’ machines. Other eMule-related services include Vagaa (哇嘎), which provides its own application that promises accelerated eMule and BitTorrent downloads, as well as its own proprietary file download service. The China eMule (中国电骡) is an almost identical copy of the Vagaa homepage and offers links to the Vagaa application and shared files but does not seem to be related to Vagaa – a bootleg of a bootleg service? All very dodgy. BitTorrent is another file sharing protocol. Netizens access a seed file (with the extension .torrent), and their BT application connects to a tracker to find out which other users (known as peers) are sharing the file. Once peers are identified, the BT application downloads that file bit-by-bit from multiple users. The BT@China Alliance unifies several dozen smaller BBS discussion forums where netizens post the locations of BT seed files (which can essentially be anywhere). BT@China is searchable by keyword, file name, or “hash” – a unique ID that identifies a specific file for download. Xunlei, also known as “Thunder,” is one of the most popular file sharing services. It’s a combination of proprietary software and a group of associated websites, but it is also shunned by more civic-minded P2P users for enabling “leeching”: the software is designed to allow users to suck bandwidth by downloading from BT or eMule networks without contributing a corresponding amount of uploaded information. This goes against standard / culture of file-sharing etiquette and may result in users of these programs getting banned from central servers. Xunlei also provides a website for online viewing of HD videos served through the software from its own network rather than individual users’ machines. Google owns a small stake in Xunlei, and the software is part of Baidu’s search alliance, which embeds a Baidu search bar into the program. As a testament to its popularity, Xunlei is a perennial entry on Baidu’s rankings of top search terms. It’s currently at #15.

what else can you pirate online in China? ::
There’s niche pirating going on as well, although not much of it is large enough in size to require the use of P2P transfers. Academic publications, for example, can be prohibitively expensive if your university doesn’t subscribe, so communities have sprung up to fill the need for reduced-cost or free academic books and journals. From time to time people will discover loopholes or back doors in online journal archives, and they’ll share the technique on a forum like Pet2008, one of the major communities for academic journal sharing. Other times, a student or faculty member at a university that subscribes to a particular archive will set up a proxy service to allow off-campus netizens access to an on-campus IP address, which will get them into the archive. This is very common. The Yuyu College forum has a page for “free access” that lists a number of these servers. The practice has developed its own economy: payment in virtual currency is required to read many of the posts, and netizens earn credits by posting resources or purchasing them outright, but the cost is far less than what legitimate access to academic archives would require. Namipan is a file host that uses its own proprietary software and protocol, as well as offering slower, less reliable web-based downloads. Users upload files to the Namipan servers, and when other netizens wish to download them, their web browser will hand off the link to the Namipan download application (like many of these programs, the interoperability is seamless for IE users but less reliable for users of other web browsers). All kinds of information is shared this way, from music albums to book scans – a scanned Chinese edition of the mainland China-censored Zhao Ziyang memoir was available on Namipan right after it hit the streets. Damipan (大米盘), whose name seems inspired by Namipan, does not have its own download application but allows users to share files through various protocols, including eMule and Xunlei. Many of the most popular file sharing sites restrict the quantity of data unregistered users can download, and a fair number of them have policies in place that remove pornographic material. So porn is frequently shared through BitTorrent, with the .torrent seed files uploaded to a file sharing site. Or else they’re simply shared through Xunlei. See the movie download sections of overseas sites like 92xxoo or Xiao77 (a well-known site that frequently changes IP addresses and URLs to ensure easy access from mainland porn enthusiasts). For those that thought the Chinese Internet has been thoroughly scrubbed of politically sensitive, pornographic, or otherwise “unharmonious” content, think again. It’s all readily available to the average Chinese netizen.

does pirating in China ever suck? ::
Installing programs designed to facilitate the sharing of copyrighted material has always come with an element of risk. eMule is known to be free of adware and spyware, but because it is an open source program, other providers are able to offer their own eMule packages that may include dodgier add-ons. Apart from coming bundled with adware and dodgy browser redirects, Xunlei’s implementation of its own P2P network came under fire for consuming all of its user’s upload bandwidth: the program would scan a user’s entire hard drive and upload files that other Xunlei users are requesting. Users would unwittingly max out their bandwidth. In the face of widespread user dissatisfaction, the company tweaked the software to throttle uploads. Tuotu (脱兔) was launched by developers who liked the Xunlei software itself but were disgusted by the way the associated service leeched files from other archives. It supports a number of popular sharing protocols including eMule and BT, but doesn’t seem to have any source of income at the moment, or much to distinguish it from all of the rest of the marketplace. One additional problem – more of an annoyance, really – comes when the ISP gets tired of downloaders hogging bandwidth and throttles the standard ports that many protocols use. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse: in response to ISPs placing limits on standard eMule ports, the software now comes with options to choose random ports in the hopes that the ISP will simply ignore the gigabytes of IPR infringing content you’re copying to your hard drive.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: the below “thing” showed up at the Neocha.com studio a couple weeks ago – at first I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t take me long to fall in love. It’s part funky plastic casing, part string-bound book, and part pixel-art USB rabbit – there is some Styrofoam-like substance and a magnet in there as well. It was gifted to us from W+K Shanghai and is essentially a credentials document presenting the agency’s work in China for 2008. The book is full of what books should be full of – bold, compelling photos. Even without a word of text, it captures (what appears to be) the creative energy and inspiration behind W+K client campaigns. They even went as far to pre-load the pixel-art USB rabbit with cool multimedia content – a Flash presentation of 2008 W+K work, with photos and videos; and a separate video showcasing life at W+K for employees. All of us in the marketing / advertising / PR space in China should take note of this effort. I’m très impressed. Bravo, well done. Good timing too, I just lost my USB drive – I want a fucking laptop next year though, or a pair of Nikes. // AjS

:: see below for an excellent tribute to the late Michael Jackson by famed Chinese sand-painter Su Dabao. The soundtrack is a Jackson song titled 2 Bad, one of his lesser-known but better tracks (a personal favorite of mine actually). Enjoy. // AjS

[To give credit where credits due, Youku Buzz also featured this today in its email newsletter; however, I first saw it on Kaixin001.com.]

:: taken in Shanghai at the intersection of Huaihai Rd. and Changshu Rd.; a 50-meter hole in the ground, part of the construction site for the city’s Line 7 subway project. Not sure if they are pipes or support beams, perhaps both. // AjS

:: see the first photo below for a recent throw-up by Shanghai’s most prolific and probably most talented graffiti writer Mr. Lan. Does anyone recognize the other pieces / tags? If so, please let me know in the comments section. These photos were taken by fifty 5-reader Roach C. in Shanghai near the Anshan Xicun subway station. Thanks for sending them my way Roach C.  // AjS

:: see below for a fun stop-motion film titled Webcam (摄像头). The short was made by Neocha.com-user Lvmu, a third year student at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and it tells the story of an adventurous webcam trying to break free from the laptop its tethered to. Forty-five seconds of enjoyment – I promise.  // AjS

[full disclosure: fifty 5 is a partner at Neocha.com]

:: taken in Shanghai at the intersection of Tongren Rd. and Yanan Rd., a Faile sticker spotted on a traffic light. For those who aren’t familiar with Faile, they are a contemporary urban art collective of sorts, founded in Brooklyn, New York. You don’t see their stickers in China much, if at all. To read more about their last stop in Shanghai, link here and here.  // XD

:: taken in Shanghai on Fahuazhen Rd. near Jiaotong University; a very well done chalkboard Haibao – the official mascot of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.  // XD

:: online communities in China can link people together based on common interests. Sometimes, these interests are located online — gaming, net lit, online video, tech — but often times people are involved in offline pursuits that they wish to share with their netizen friends. Some communities / discussion forums are national in nature and connect people from across the country. Others are more locally-focused and serve as online outposts of a groups that meet frequently in the real world. Although each of the following activities takes place offline, practitioners meet online to plan events, share videos, seek help with techniques, or shoot the breeze with other people interested in the same thing.

parkour ::
Parkour and the art of free-running, which started in the 80s actually, has exploded in popularity worldwide over the past few years, and China is no exception. The Parkour and Free Running Training website offers background information on the sport as well as space for traceurs to share their experiences. These include photos of interesting moves and videos of stunts (here’s Guangzhou’s “city spanker” club). Some videos attempt to work parkour into a narrative, like the 20-minute “I’m not a solitary hero”  (我不是独行侠), the story of how one parkour team was formed. A Douban group for parkour enthusiasts recommends the Paoku.com.cn website. Individual local teams sometimes have their own websites. City Monkey, a Beijing-based team of traceurs and one of the forces behind Paoku.com.cn, keeps track of its activities on a website and a blog. The group’s updates are infrequent, but it has received a fair amount of local media coverage as parkour has entered the public consciousness over the past year. Other teams are listed on the LeParkour website, which includes groups in Wuhan (C-traceur) and Xi’an (Freefly). For more information (and lots of Parkour videos) see an earlier post I did on fifty 5.

biking ::
Biking has a huge online presence in China. Most online biking communities are BBS-style discussion forums, although a few sites, like Qixingquan, have attempted to build a Web2.0 SNS community out of bikers, to limited success. ChinaBike (车友论坛), whose full name is “China Bicycle Enthusiast Net,” is a typical BBS aimed at bicyclists. The most popular sub-boards are those devoted to road and mountain bikes, which mostly consists of technical issues, and a marketplace for second-hand bikes ( ). The site is quite active, garnering several thousand comments a day, and it has a huge list of links to a wealth of other cycling websites at the bottom of the home page. Many of those sites are local forums, and university clubs are particularly common. PKU has a bike club, the Cycling Association of Peking University, whose online presence accompanies an offline organization founded in 1995. The site exists to organize bike hikes, share information, and connect student bicyclists with each other. More generally, Qiche8 is a BBS aimed at college student bicyclists across the country, and has sub-forums for schools in various regions. Within the scope of bicycling, BMX (小轮车) is the focus of quite a few community forums. China BMX is one major clearinghouse for BMX-related information. showing off their members who have made the covers of BMX-related magazines. Nukebike is a general forum for BMX, street bike, and dirt bike exploits, but similar to parkour, biking is an activity pursued by local clubs across the country, many of whom have their own online presence. A BMX club in Wuhan keeps a blog on Blogbus which hosts some striking action photographs and multiple-exposure images of jumps. Enthusiasts often post videos of their skills to various video hosts. Here, Yang Mingkai (杨明凯), a twenty-something BMXer in Beijing, shows off to the sound of the Beastie Boys on a sidewalk, and in competition.

skateboarding ::
Kickerclub (ignore the unfortunate logo), is a bilingual website devoted to skateboarding exploits in China. According to the about page, Kickerclub was founded in 2001 by a skater from Qingdao who was studying in Xi’an at the time, and is now working in skateboard-related merchandising. The site features skateboard tutorials, products for sale, and videos of skateboarders in China and around the world. There’s an associated Douban group where members post photos of activities and skate-ups in various cities. The latest was a meet-up in Chengdu for World Skateboard Day on June 21. Another Douban group, Skate, provides a helpful bilingual list of skate lingo, which is fairly fluid, as the three renderings of “ollie” illustrates (翱骊, 豚跳, 带板腾空). China Skateboards is a clearinghouse for skateboard-related information and announcements. These include photos of events, such as recent meet-ups in Nanjing and Shijiazhuang. The website has a channel on Youku where it posts videos, mostly of foreign skateboarders, but occasionally of locals. SkateHere, a product-oriented skateboarding website, hosts blogs from some well-known names in the field. Along fashion lines, it has a tons of photos from the launch of Nike’s SB line of skateboard shoes; a promotional video of the shoes has been pretty big this year, and features Tiananmen and other recognizable Beijing locales.

dancing ::
Break dancing, called “street dancing” (街舞) and Pili wu (霹雳舞) in Chinese has a fairly large online presence. Breakdance China is an collaborative blog that aims to provide information to China’s breakdance enthusiasts. Blog posts are frequent – several per day – and include announcements of upcoming events, photos of recent events, videos of dancing, and complaints about “kids these days.” The website is also host to the Quanzhou Middle School Break Dance Hiphop forum, a community for “Ha.5 Club” breakdancers from Fujian. Breakdance China links to 52 Breaking, a BBS forum for breakdancing fans. The most active sub-board is devoted to teaching techniques. Techniques are also the predominant focus of the active Baidu Postbar on breakdancing, which at the time of writing claims 2,780 members and 55,759 topics. One classic post is instructional and uses videos that mix popular music videos and actual break dance (for example). The BBS Hiphop City, whose URL can be interpreted to mean “I want to dance, dance, dance!” is a forum for all kinds of hiphop dancing, divided by city. The website is inclusive of other interests associated with hiphop dancing and urban / street culture: it has sub-forums for graffiti, MCing, and DJing. Current top stories are mostly in memory of Michael Jackson. Latin dancing is another up-and-coming activity, but because it’s organized a little less organically than breakdancing, online communities are more oriented toward formal training: people posting to the Douban group are largely looking for instructors or training centers, and a lot of websites are hosted by studios rather than community or discussion forums hosted by groups of enthusiasts. There are abundant instructional resources on China’s video hosts (example).

rock climbing ::
China Outdoor Information Center (户外资料网), a widely used website for outdoor activities has extensive information on alternative sports, including climbing. The social networking site hosts groups ranging from mountain climbing to rock climbing, and includes photo albums of indoor and outdoor climbing experiences. China Climber, a Beijing-based forum aimed at a national audience (including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau), has a sub-board where members can share stories of their climbs. Many local climbing groups host their own websites. LS Climbing is a Shaanxi-based forum associated with the Xi’an Rock Climbing Fund, an organization devoted to developing destinations for rock climbers. The Xi’an version is inspired by a similar organization in Shanghai, which is affiliated with the Rock Lizard BBS. A Baidu Postbar on rock climbing has a fair amount of traffic and covers climbing walls as well as outdoor excursions. And of course no sport would be complete without photos of sexy models pretending to take part.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: Neocha.com-user HKER is up to his old tricks again, only this time he’s not pulling them in Shanghai. I caught up with him yesterday and he was kind enough to share a few photos of work he’s done over the past couple of years in Wenzhou, Zhejiang – see below. He also told me he’ll be writing more frequently in the coning months – watch this space for photos. Related, last year I featured HKER in a short documentary I did about the graffiti scene in Shanghai, link here to check it out. // AjS

[full disclosure: fifty 5 is a partner at Neocha.com]

:: my friend Brad and his wife recently found this subversive RMB 10 note in Shanghai. If you don’t know what’s printed on it, please consult your Chinese dictionary. I’ve heard about this before, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it. Clever, and probably quite effective at spreading a message. Has anyone else come across such notes?  // AjS

:: Dominic Johnson-Hill, the founder of Beijing-based designer / hipster clothing-maker Plastered T-shirts, is now creating stained glass portraits of famous Chinese revolutionary figures. Five Chinese artists have been commissioned to create the pieces, and versions of Mao Zedong, Lei Feng, and Deng Xiaoping are already done – see below. Dominic says there will be more pieces, so watch this space or check out Plastered T-shirts’ blog. /// AjS

:: check out this superb 3D animation by Neocha.com-user ZP686 titled Fatman & Moto. It was nominated for awards at the University Animation Festival and by the Beijing Film Academy’s Animation Institute. In his infinite modesty, ZP6986 told me that he’s actually in the process of redoing Fatman & Moto because he doesn’t think it’s very good. At any rate, enjoy – I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say it’s excellent. To view the video on VIMEO, link here. Below the video I’ve also shared a slideshow of “making of” photos – it’s very interesting to see the process of the character coming alive.

ZP686 is originally from Baotou, Inner Mongolia. He graduated from the Beijing Fashion Institute’s new media and animation school in 2008. Although trained as an illustrator and animator, he is currently employed in Beijing by the American special effects company Base FX as a concept art designer. // AjS

[full disclosure: fifty 5 is a partner at Neocha.com]

:: I’m an animation and 3D / CG junkie. I recently watched Coraline. It’s excellent. I highly recommend taking the time to check it out. Bravo, well done.  // AjS

[UPDATE: Thanks to Xiao Du for pointing out that Coraline is available in full-length format on Youku, link here or watch below. However, it's of course much better on a big screen or in HD.]