Beijing’s Pirated DVD Shredding Party
It wasn’t as dramatic as in years past, when intellectual property authorities used steam-rollers instead of shredding machines, but what a recent Chinese anti-piracy activity lacked in heavy machinery it more than made up for in quantity.
China held a nationwide “destruction activity” Friday that aimed to pulverize 26.5 million pirated DVDs, books and “illegal periodicals,” as the country pursues what some experts have described as an unprecedented crackdown on intellectual property violations.
The activity kicked off at a storage facility in the Beijing suburbs, where police feds hundreds of pirated DVDs into a row of shredding machines, destroying illegal copies of everything from Korean dramas and the Lord of the Rings trilogy to Microsoft’s Windows operating system and porn films (the latter of which, while apparently pirated, were more likely destroyed because porn is banned in China.) China said the destruction was meant to ring in World Intellectual Property Day, which falls Tuesday.