Salon.com > Jeff Radice http://www.salon.com Sat, 25 May 2013 20:30:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 DVD pirates and hobbits in Southeast Asia http://www.salon.com/2002/02/27/dvd_piracy/ http://www.salon.com/2002/02/27/dvd_piracy/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2002 20:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/02/27/dvd_piracy Like all markets in Cambodia, the Russian market in Phnom Penh is chaotic, packed with hawking and gawking merchants. The floors are littered and various hunks of animal flesh can be purchased, but by Cambodian standards the market is clean and fairly modern. Paint vendors stand next to motorcycle part sellers and a cluster of bootleg video vendors -- all in all, a typical Southeast Asian market.

After negotiating my way through a warren of stalls and struggling to get my bearings, I find the DVD section. There are about half a dozen vendors, but I go directly to a shop I have already visited. And there it is -- "The Fellowship of the Ring" on DVD. Barely two weeks after the movie has been released in the United States, I'm staring at a pirated DVD version of it in Phnom Penh. I ask the shopkeeper to demo the quality. He starts up the movie as I browse through his other stock. The video starts, and I wait for credits.

Not knowing how the movie begins I don't know how long to wait. After five minutes, I wonder if perhaps this is some elaborate hoax. I wait another five minutes. Finally I ask, and discover that this is actually the second disc of a two disc set. And it's a VCD -- a video compact disc. VCD no good. I want DVD.

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