BEIJING - Another weekend in the big holiday movie season is here, and while Americans will have to line up to pay their $8 to see the just-released Harry Potter sequel, Chinese film lovers have only to walk to the neighborhood DVD salesman and buy it for less than a dollar.
And The Two Towers, the second epic in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, might not be out in the United States until next month, but it was sold on streets here many months ago, long before it was even finished. So was the third, though it's not due out until 2003.
Needless to say, when it comes to pirated copies of movies that haven't been made yet, well, caveat emptor.
In China, where everything from Madonna to Microsoft is pirated, the U.S. holiday movie season provides another boost to the multibillion-dollar gray economy.
Much to the consternation of Hollywood studios, virtually every major movie released in the United States is available within days on city street corners in China and around the world, from Moscow to Kuala Lumpur.
In China, the hawkers, often once-poor rural migrants, are the visible endpoints of huge criminal operations responsible for producing and selling hundreds of millions of pirated DVDs each year, from such classics as Citizen Kane and The Godfather to the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
Chinese officials have investigated and shut down a number of production lines, but there's little sign of a crackdown at the retail end. Though many DVD sellers take up residence inside bars and restaurants, others operate in plain view, whether on sidewalks or in DVD and compact-disc stores with pirated copies prominently displayed in the front window. Some are even packaged with ratings measuring how good a fake it is - a "DVD-9" is a perfect or near-perfect copy of a film already released on DVD in America, unless of course the rating itself is fake.
"It's common sense that these are pirated, but the policemen have much bigger things to worry about," said a 46-year-old DVD seller named Zhu, who was concerned enough about the police to ask that he be identified only by his surname.
Zhu operates 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, out of a friend's furniture store in central Beijing, where he arrived last year from a small farming village in Jiangsu, a coastal province near Shanghai.
Though he would not disclose his actual income, he said he earned at least $1,500 a year, five times what he earned as a Communist Party cadre in his former village. Other retail sellers acknowledged earning more than $2,000 a year.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has been widely available in Beijing since Monday, the day after the opening weekend in the United States. Zhu offered a competitive price of 7 yuan, about 85 cents. His profit on such newly released movies, he said, is usually 12 cents or less per copy.
As with virtually all pirated recent releases, Harry Potter's picture quality is fuzzy and the sound isn't quite Dolby Digital, because someone has recorded the movie using a camcorder inside a theater. Shadowy silhouettes sometimes appear in such versions - people getting up from their seats to get popcorn or go to the lavatory.
In the case of The Two Towers, sold on DVD here before it was even made, buyers who popped the disc into the player found, instead, a perfect copy of The Sword and the Sorcerer, a forgettable 1982 film starring Lee Horsley (television's Matt Houston). Buyers of the third Lord of the Rings feature were instead treated to Legend, a 1986 movie that represents one of the more obscure efforts by Tom Cruise.
"There is no honor in those thieves, is there?" said Michael C. Ellis, an anti-piracy official based in Hong Kong who represents the major Hollywood studios. "Outrageous, those poor consumers who thought they were buying genuine pirated discs."
The pirated DVD business in China represented an estimated $160 million in lost sales for genuine DVDs last year for the seven Hollywood studios represented by the Motion Picture Association of America, according to Ellis. He is regional director of anti-piracy for the Asia Pacific office of the Motion Picture Association.
About 90 percent of DVDs sold in China are illegal copies, a figure that hasn't changed much in recent years - though Ellis credits the Chinese government with cracking down on exports of the bootlegs to other nations and with getting more serious about the issue now that China has gained entry into the World Trade Organization.
The piracy problem persists, though, because it's so profitable. DVD piracy worldwide, according to the MPA, costs the studios roughly $3 billion in lost sales. And the pirates are making much more than that.
"They're making far more than we're losing," Ellis said. "The risks of doing piracy are far less than the drug trade and yet your profits can be significantly greater."
The pirating of a movie begins with its release, when someone shoots a poor-quality video with a camcorder inside a theater - followed by a better camcorder version shot possibly after hours, with the acquiescence of a theater owner.
In rare occasions, pirates get their hands on an original print of a film itself soon after release, stealing it from theaters at night for long enough to make a copy. Rewards can be high for premium copies, such as one rumored to have been made of Planet of the Apes.
"They had the word out on the street that if you could obtain a copy of this particular blockbuster, we will pay you 10, 20, 30 thousand U.S. dollars," Ellis said.
Once the studio releases its own DVD of a film, the pirates still find work copying it.
"The problem is," Ellis said, "the 10,000th copy is as good as the first copy, because it's digital."
So far this year, according to the MPA, Chinese authorities have closed down 11 illegal replication lines that could have reaped upward of $200 million a year in underground profits. Many more are still in operation.
"Some have criminal syndicate connections, some are connected to the military, some are businesspeople who walk the gray line," Ellis said.
A raid in Thailand, he said, produced information that the factory involved was financed by Taiwan money. Workers came from mainland China, Hong Kong and Myanmar.
The profit margin for sellers typically ranges from perhaps less than a dime to more than a half-dollar per DVD. Some savvy sellers targeting unsuspecting tourists can make up to $2 profit per disc.
For buyers, the pirated DVD often represents the only way they will get to see many American movies, because China limits the number of foreign movies it shows in its theaters.
For sellers, there's the risk of police raids and street sweeps, usually before the visit of a top U.S. official or a major national event such as the recent Communist Party congress. Usually, those caught are hit with small fines, hardly much of a deterrent for poor migrants trying to make a living.
And the growing pool of millions of unemployed migrant workers in China's urban centers provides a big labor supply for such black market jobs, even as it increases the competition for sales. Most retailers work seven days a week, many of them selling movies they never get a chance to see.
"I don't watch them," said Tang Jincheng, 34, a Jiangsu native who says he works 15 hours a day selling movies for less than a dollar inside a Beijing restaurant. "I have a DVD player, but I have no time."