First, the Vietnamese street vendors don't categorize their movies, so relatively recent films such as "Vanilla Sky," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Moulin Rouge" are mixed in with "The Big Sleep" and the famed "Red," "White" and "Blue" trilogy from Krzysztof Kieslowsky.
Second, the pirates here have adopted the just-in-time manufacturing ethos of Dell Computer. Often, you have to make your selection first and then a guy on a mo-ped runs off with your order to his friend with a burner.
In the end, it took me about an hour, and I had to visit three stores. They charged me 30,000 VN ($2) for "Harry Potter" and US$2 more for "The Lord of the Rings." The colour is a bit bright on both films--the official DVDs aren't out yet--but both work. Coincidentally, the Viet Nam News on the same day reported that Potter's Asian distributor still hadn't decided whether to bring the movie to Vietnam because of piracy concerns.
"At first, they would encode these for Chinese machines, which meant it wouldn't work on US computers. It took them about a day to figure that out. Now everything works fine on American stuff," said Patrick Morris, a former IT manager at VentureOne and currently the director of VeloAsia, which runs bicycle tours. "I'll never forget the time I bought 'Mr. Yee's Windows 98.'"
Western corporations have their work cut out for them when it comes to stemming piracy. Combine an industrious, hardworking population fascinated with all things electronic with grinding poverty, and you get an explosive combination. What do you think underemployed undergraduates and high-school students are doing with their ample spare time? Rewriting the "Windows Tricks and Tips" manual, that's what.
Internet cafes dot the street. Many are filled with tourists, but also with Vietnamese teenagers. The 12-year-old granddaughter of the owner of the cafe where I am sitting now reconfigured the networking protocols so I could get online.
Creative marketing
Local pirates have even come up with ways to give their pirated software seemingly legitimate serial numbers, Morris said. In other words, if you buy a copy of Adobe Photoshop, there is a strong likelihood that you could then register it to get legitimate updates.
Nearly every software title, film and album is available on the streets of this city, which itself is a backwater compared with Saigon. Windows XP sells for 25,000 VN (US$1.67), the same as Red Hat Linux. Windows Me is cheaper, but it doesn't sell well. "Buggy," said a woman who ran one of the stores. A disk containing 35 music-compression and recording applications goes for 35,000 VN US($2.33).
Norton appears to have a strong edge over Symantec in terms of market share, and Visual Basic looks to be the toolkit of choice. The folks at Macromedia should be glad to know that Dreamweaver is incredibly popular too.
Music abounds as well, although it's a little more out-of-date. Most stores feature artists such as Louis Armstrong, The Police or Van Morrison.
And they don't just stop at simple piracy. When the Vietnamese illegally copy a film, they copy protected material from other sources to make the package seem that much more professionally done. On the back of my "Harry Potter" DVD, the movie is described as follows:
"Jackson Pollock was America's Greatest painter. Children will thrill to his story so come on, let's go have an adventure."
The credits on the "Lord of the Rings" disc say the movie stars Jean-Claude Van Damme and is based on a story by Larry Ferguson.
PCs a tough sell
Although the software makers are up a creek, the hardware guys are facing a different problem: penetration. PCs remain expensive. They cost the same as PCs in the States. A Viet-built Celeron PC goes for about US$750 with monitor, and a Pentium III sells for US$800.
Still, US$800 for a family in Vietnam is a far larger portion of the family budget, so most people depend on the computers at home or pay by the minute in cafes. Access is dirt cheap. An hour of Internet time ranges from 2,000 VT (12 cents) to 12,000 VT (75 cents), and those are the tourist prices. Locals pay less.
Rather than computers, "white goods" are what most families are in the stage of investing in: The streets are lined with stores selling stereos, TVs, fridges and washer-dryers. Cell phones are also big (and if you'd like, you can get a fake Nokia phone cover featuring a scantily clad Catherine Zeta-Jones for 18 cents).
PCs are actually tough to find. In two days, I've found only one store that sells PCs, and it was in the luxury mall. They sold Hewlett-Packard notebooks and desktops, and roughly for the same price as in the States. A complete desktop system with a flat-panel screen and printer went for US$1,507, and Celeron notebooks sold for around US$1,200. On the highway, I saw one sign for Compaq Computer.
The hardware makers in some ways are doing to the Vietnamese what the local population is doing to the software makers. That is, sticking it to them. All the HP desktops were configured with Rambus memory--the 800MHz variety. Rambus memory has been hounded out of the States, but you can't avoid it here. Seems like someone is doing some component dumping.
Which city are you talking about? Saigon? Hanoi? In any case, the shops clustered around the tourist quarters are the worst of the lot. In the downtown electronics/computer market there are mini-factories burning anything on CD you may ever want. Most of those places have a first floor filled with catalogs, customers browse the listings, write down the CD number, and pick up the selections at the counter. Upstairs, there may be 2 or more floors of guys burning Cds, DVDs, and VCDs. CD-ROMs sell for around 10,000 VND (around 75 cents) and most places have somekind of buy 2 get one free etc. Enough software to fill up your HD may set you back a whopping $5.
The movie places and software places tend to be seperate, and again, outside the main tourist/backpacker areas the selection and service are better. The long wait in the tourist district shops is usually because they send someone on a motorbike to another shop to buy what you want. So the prices may be higher, depending on the shop.
Pirated movies in Vietnam have several different Grades. VCDs in general tend to be very poor copies or copies filmed inside some Singapore movie theatre. Most of these are classified Ban Dep films (the soundtrack of the movie features a Vietnamese overdubbed translation on one or both speakers). Incredibly annoying and makes most new VCDs and videos unwatchable for English speakers. DVDs are usually good quality copies on very poor quality CDs and usually have no special features, specials, etc. Many of these copies seem to be of American origin- studio or Oscar preview copies.
For awhile it was a common practice for airport customs officials to impound or "examine" incoming and outgoing CDs and videos. Oddly enough, copies of the same movies would make it to the street in a week or so. An acquaintance of mine brought back his treasured copy of the Jesus of Nazareth TV miniseries. It was examined at the airport and returned. In a week it was available in every video rental store in HCMC complete with photocopied video box bearing his initials, and Vietnamese subtitling.
And thats how revolution was won.