Without waxing too capitalist on the very certain characteristics principal to the economics of scarcity — such as supply and demand — it’s very interesting and surprising that Warner’s Chinese home video distribution business is bucking the trend and dropping the cost of their DVDs in piracy-ridden markets like China to about a dollar fifty in order to drum up some demand. The economic term for this is dumping: not charging market price for goods in foreign markets because of mean income, as a matter of policy, or to remain competitive.

So will this DVD dumping finally be enough to prevent a populace with little or no concept of intellectual property and copyright from just buying a $0.75 knockoff DVD in place of a legit disc? Hard to say, but I can definitely tell you that combined with the fact that in China first-run Warner films can get released on DVD a month earlier than in America, domestic consumers are just bound to continue the silent revolt already underway. After all, if the Chinese earned themselves the privilege of movies released earlier and cheaper than the US by way of rampant piracy, then perhaps rampant piracy is needed in America before Hollywood will wake up to the world it’s actually in — not the one it thinks it’s in.