Alar said:
I do recall hearing about this a couple months back. Such a blatant rip-off... and yet I doubt Blizzard will be able to do anything about it, Chinese copyright law being what it is (practically non-existent).
The last time I remember this coming up was them ripping off Gundam.
That said, your correct. China is a robber economy, to put it bluntly China doesn't actually produce or innovate much of it's own (not to be confused with me saying nothing of it's own) and instead knocks off the achievements of others, which it then repackages and resells for trillions and trillions of dollars. This not just limited to things like IPs connected to entertainment, but eletronics, drugs, clothing, and other assorted things.
Stupidly, we (the US) and other nations turn around and continuously "borrow" money that they are basically stealing from us to begin with.
The World Court, as far as there is such a thing, has been sitting on the issue of international property rights and such due to it likely seeing off World War III. Simply put if copyrights are protected it means nations like China are in a position where they will lose all of the money they are making, and what's more become liable for substantial penelties to the rest of the world.... being forced to go to war for survivial. At the same time if copyrights are NOT going to be upheld this means nations like the US and other first world countries whose power is dependant on their developments and control of the things they have created will need to go to war in order to protect that. It's a complicated situation and things remain the way they are as groups like the UN drag their feet because there is no GOOD way things can turn out here.
This not surprisingly gets to the core of certain issues like the US debt to China, and it's very validity when you consider the amount of money on the line through the violations China is already on the hook for. Things like "Joyland" (which itself is sort of a rip-off name of Japan's "Joyopolis") are really pretty minor, the REAL issues are products like Viagra which had billions of dollars invested in them, and which represent billions of dollars a year in lost profits due to nations like China knocking it off, and then selling the duplicate product. The share of that going to the goverments (US and France mostly) through Pfizers itself doesn't seem like a huge deal, but when you compound that by hundreds of thousands of products being knocked off... yeah... you see why China's sweatshops have created a booming economy.
Honestly, with the economy in the shape it is, I half expect that if the world ends (or ends as we know it) next year as some nutjobs predict, it might very well be the result of a war over this, as the lines are very quickly being drawn between East Vs. West. A lot of those with anti-US sentiments will talk about the US's debt, but at the same time they tend to overlook what's owed to us, including by some of those creditors, and the same applies to a lot of countries as well. Things like the US's reduction in borrowing power might have those with anti-US sentiments cheering for a number of reasons, but in the end that's simply moving things closer to a head, because it's making it more crucial that the US get things sorted with China, and while Blizzard's IPs are a drop in the bucket you can pretty much point to Joyland as an example of EXACTLY what I'm talking about accross a spectrum of thousands upon thousands of differant products and properties, both physical and purely intellectual.
