General Mackevili wrote: just noticed in the local news that they raided a Chinese business man's warehouse of incense. Why? Because it looked similar to another business man's incense! ![/spoiler]

Holy Crap,

What if this type of enforcement was applied to bar girls throughout South East Asia!!!
"....raided because one man's bar girls looked similar to another man's bar girls..."
the revenue the police would collect...

did that sound racist?

i read that cambodia had a legal exemption from copyright until just recently.

I think that was only for educational materials, textbooks etc.

no, it was globally across all products:

https://www.cambodiadaily.com/archives/ ... ets-26805/

General Mackevili wrote:I was glad to see this article. I predict that Cambodia will be like Singapore within 5 years, only cleaner.

No that is humour!

frank lee bent wrote:no, it was globally across all products:
https://www.cambodiadaily.com/archives/ ... ets-26805/

Interesting article.

Pily Wong, chief representative and country manager for Microsoft in Cambodia and president of the ICT Business Association, said that 95 percent of software used in Cambodia is pirated, preventing both international firms and local startups from being successful here.

That is just an ideological conjecture. Google and Facebook are quite successful in Cambodia. It is only the likes of Microsoft that are not. That has got nothing to do with copyrights, but everything with Microsoft.

Nowadays, software is distributed on the internet. Do they really expect the Cambodian authorities to police the (international) internet for software downloads? It is beyond the capacity of the technologically most advanced countries to do a thing like that, let alone Cambodia. In other words, the war is over and the copyright regimists have lost.

Mr. Baker said that European countries and the U.S. were negotiating “in bad faith” to force poorer states to enforce rules that will not benefit them.

Indeed, do they really believe that other people should go out of their way to prevent their outdated, 19th century licensing regime from collapsing? Distributing information and at the same time trying to prevent information from being copied/distributed, amounts to defying the laws of nature. It is indeed quite a nasty neo-colonial strategy to drag Cambodia into that nonsense.

Western views about right and wrong are a set of godless depravities that cannot last, and indeed, attempts to impose one's own misguided views about right and wrong onto others are always particularly disgusting.

Good post eriksank!

I have noticed that despite the availability of Ubuntu, I've met maybe 2 Khmers using it, most don't even know about it, including IT guys.

One question: if the whole copyright thing is disregarded, why the trashing of DVD's every once in a while? Appearances? Paid visits?

DVDs are very cheap. Note- the computers and HDD are not seized- nor are the dvd burners.

"...a set of godless depravities that cannot last..."

Goodness. Please continue.