Question: How would you deal with pirates selling illegal copies of your original product?
Answer: I would become a kind of pirate too! I would start chipping off a big chunk from their (pirates) profits by starting to sell my own “original fakes” and right on their own turf… aiming to take customers away from them. I would give people an option to buy cheaper versions of my original products (with worse quality, of course).
For example, lets take the famous Kaosan Road in Bangkok where backpackers for 150 baht can buy a copy of any latest movie or software program. It is a very strategically important spot, thousands of tourists roaming in hordes there 24/7! So I would open a small shop there with a big sign:
BUY ORIGINAL FAKE MOVIES HERE! LEGALLY!
And the street vendors selling “not original fakes” (not endorsed by the legal owner) can do nothing, for they have no legal leverage to complain.
The “original fakes” would cost half the established pirate price (i.e. 50 instead of 150 baht) and some popular items I would be giving out for free!
Here's an example:
Thus we'd gain:
1. 50 baht for each copy which otherwise would go to pirates (a million copies sold a year!).
2. economic weakening of illegal piracy marketiers.
3. make a lot of people happy
(Current market price for a fake copy movie is set to 3€ (150 baht) since a few years now. Competition will be forced to match their prices to be able to stay afloat. When this happens, we start offering ALL our products for free. This will eventually eliminate the pirate competition.)
p.s. why not to set up a special counter-piracy enterprise agency sponsored by all major movie studios? With outlets in all major tourist nests in South East Asia and
why not even sell a bulk of our legal fakes for pennies to local street vendors so that they would flood the fake market and undermine competitors?
Eventually fakes become almost worthless!
