the color of its countries

And no, I don't mean Chow Yun-Fat and his band of corsairs in the latest Pirates of the Carribean installment, although those guys were pretty awesome.

I mean, just look at that moustache.

More seriously, here is a dated-but-nevertheless-interesting USATODAY article addressing pirated music in China (I found it linked by Paul Irish on Aurgasm, a favorite audioblog of mine).

My previous misgivings aside, this is one of the reasons China does exert a magnetic pull on me: it feels like a slightly tilted vision of modernity, one that offers both a darker Orwellian slant on things (like A Sound of Thunder post-butterfly-squish—though I guess that'd be Bradburian) and, at the same time, a substitute option for the future: one we in America might opt to take if it turns out to be the better alternative. I'm loath to use the phrase "guinea pig," but there is a certain element of "Oh! Well, that wasn't so bad, was it? Maybe we shouldn't have worried." In this case, maybe we can forget about cracking down on digital music theft after all.