THERE is nothing very golden about the Golden Arcade, a low rise shop all surrounded by narrow streets full of the jostling traffic and pedestrians of Hong Kong. It is under the flightpath for Kai Tak airport so the approach to it is enlivened by planes screaming overhead. They are several hundred feet up but feel, and sound, close enough to touch.
Nor does the building itself look like the hub of an international trade war. Its glass and concrete sides are without the display windows and signs of most shopping centres. It is as though it has shunned advertising, confident that what it has will draw the public, and the constant stream of customers through the entrance backs this up.
This coyness cannot have much to do with concealment, as Golden Arcade has already been denounced in one copyright agency report after another. But a certain subtlety is called for, since the pirates' activities are no longer welcome in Hong Kong.
Inside, think January sales, back when they were the sale period of the year. Dozens and dozens of flimsy stalls pack the space between the narrow aisles. Laid out on tables and climbing up the walls are CDRom covers representing every product of the international software industry.
Word processors, spreadsheets, programming languages, anti virus tools, graphics packages, operating systems, strategy games, shoot em ups, references works and children's "edutainment" - they're all here. Plus hundreds of movies on video CD and hundreds more disks of soft porn.
But what sums up the market best is the "installer", a disk crammed with as many programs as the manufacturer can find and fit on it. Super Installer 96, for example, includes Windows 95 ("96 updated"), Microsoft Office, the Windows 95 Plus pack, Norton Utilities, CorelDraw 6 and Lotus SmartSuite, 60 titles in all. Even though some are shareware and can be legally distributed this way, the Irish retail price of the commercial programs on this single disk would run to thousands of pounds.
Packaging ranges from decent copies of the original down to the most basic cellophane wrapper with a printed CD insert. You buy your own CD case yes, these are on sale too. But at the price charged £5.50 down to £2.60 for the installers fancy packaging is not an option. In fact, the profit on each crammed disk must be minimal.
One of the many ironies of the situation is that despite the multi billion dollar losses the copyright authorities attribute to software piracy worldwide the people retailing the copies here are not making much money on each disk. Behind the counters are young people, teens and early twenties predominating.
The customers crowding the aisles are mostly Chinese, students, business people, lots of school pupils on their way home looking over the games. Then there are tourists, filling shopping bags, exclaiming over the prices, in some cases ticking off shopping lists for friends at home.
Nobody seems to be concerned about the issue of software theft, but there are signs of nervousness. Lots of stalls carry "no photographs" signs, even if it is easy to miss them in the jumble of CD covers. And the biggest and best organised stall has only empty covers on show. The customer selects from these or from a catalogue and collects the disks 15 minutes later. The idea being that police or customs officers who place an order to gather evidence are entrapping the stallholder into illegality, making prosecution impossible.
Over at 298 Hennessy Road on Hong Kong Island, the scene is similar but more upmarket. The pirate software is not to the forefront, the aisles are wider the air conditioning is better. Computer hardware of every sort is for sale, from the latest (V.34 US Robotics modems with voice mail, £111) down (2,400 bps fax modems for £11). There are keyboards for £7 and sound cards for under £20; top of the range computers for 25-35 per cent less than they would cost in Ireland, and that's before bargaining.
Here the installers are being sold from cardboard boxes in the isles, and even more cheaply than in Golden Arcade. It's obviously illegal, but nobody seems to be doing anything about it today - like the trade in untaxed cigarettes, bootleg tapes and fireworks on Dublin streets.
This is another of the ironies. Hong Kong is a law abiding place which feels much safer to walk around than Dublin does. So why are the pirates still in business, despite considerable pressure from the US?
It would be too easy to say that the region has long had its seaborne pirates. Or to point out that they are still around - this autumn a ferry carrying rich gamblers between Hong Kong and Macau was held up at sea. (The pirates made off with about £600,000, but were traced because one of them left his mobile phone behind.)
The reasons for the pirate software trade include the availability of manufacturing capacity in the rapidly developing high tech region of southern China. Hong Kong has always transshipped and marketed Chinese produce. Its own high per capita income and huge tourist industry provide a ready local market too.
Academic Kenneth Ho emphasises the cultural background to the illicit trade. In the West, copying is usually perceived as a form of inferior imitation, but for the Chinese it is in fact the opposite. It is regarded as a compliment if a student can faultlessly reproduces a teacher's work."
He also points out that private property rights and individual benefits have been subordinated to the needs of society under the communist regime in China and that the 12 year old copyright laws do not count for much when "for more than 2,000 years of imperial China, attainment of the highest academic qualification is demonstrated by faultless reproduction of the classical works of the past.
Among Ho's other arguments in a dissertation for the London School of Economics are that legitimate software in Hong Kong can cost 20 per cent more than the same software in the US, and that without an indigenous software or even localisation industry Hong Kong people have little incentive to see software piracy as damaging.
The most controversial argument he quotes is that manufacturers' estimates of piracy losses are based on the false premise that for every pirate copy sold a legitimate copy would have been bought if the pirate copy had not been available.
Could it be that manufacturers chose to ignore piracy until their products had penetrated the Asian market, preferably establishing themselves as standards? Then when the market was seeded and many businesses had come to rely on the programs they could move strongly to enforce their copyright.