China Cracks Down on Web Porn; What About Pirated Movies?

The AP reports on a new crackdown by the Chinese government on web porn:

China warned Google and other popular Web portals Monday that they must do more to block pornographic material from reaching Chinese users, the latest in a series of government crackdowns targeting Internet content.

The crackdown focused on pornography but is part of a larger Chinese effort to control freedom of expression and root out material it considers destabilizing, such as sites that criticize the Communist Party, promote democratic reform or advocate Taiwan independence.

The article describes the labor-intensive methods Chinese sites already use to keep such objectionable material off the web (with only partial success):

Private Chinese Web sites often hire their own censors to delete sensitive content and images can be erased quickly at the behest of the authorities, [Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei.org, a Web site that covers Chinese media issues] said. This happened early last year when explicit photos of Hong Kong actor Edison Chen and several female partners performing sex acts circulated online. Chinese authorities arrested or detained nearly a dozen people for circulating the photos.

What's interesting is that the article contains not a word about copyright infringement, which is beyond rampant on Chinese sites. Simply put, China cares a whole lot more about keeping porn and politically sensitive topics from its people than about protecting copyright owners (especially foreign ones). I used to joke that we'd get a lot more for our anti-piracy buck (yuan?) in China if we'd just produce a lot more movies featuring heroic Tibetan and Taiwanese freedom fighters (with plenty of gratuitous sex scenes). Think those would stay on the web for long?