German authorities turning a blind eye on illegal CD sales?

[Torsten]

At the German/Czech border you can buy almost any music CD from Vietnamese vendors for the fraction of the money you have to pay at a German music store. It's quite clear that those CD's are illegal copies. This type of business has been going on since the early 90ies and the music industry might have lost billions through it. 99,9% of the buyers of those CD's are Germans who live near the Czech border.

I wonder why neither the Czech nor the German authorities are doing anything to stop these activities. Obviously they are benefiting from this business too. What do you think?
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[Jamie (K)]

This problem was brought on by the recording industry itself. When the East European countries became capitalist, the industry promoted their music in that part of the world but paid no regard to the economic differences between East and West, and they charged Western prices for their music. The price of one CD could be more than 10 days' salary for an ordinary Czech in those days. In my opinion, promoting a product so heavily and charging so high a price is simply an invitation to steal, and people did it.

Around 1993, some of the recording labels started making deals with East European companies to produce cheaper, local editions of various CDs, but by that time the genie was already out of the bottle, and intellectual property theft became the norm. As I say, the industry did it to itself.

That said, I have a completely different opinion of music and software bootlegging in Western countries, where legitimate copies are reasonably affordable.

[Torsten]

Jamie, are you saying that if the record companies had offered their CD's for a lower 'East European market prices', there wouldn't have been any bootlegging and in those countries? In other words, is a high price for a product a justification to steal intellectual property?

Also, the fact that the recording industry used to charge too much for their CD's in the early 90ies doesn't explain why neither the German nor the Czech authorities are doing anything to curb the theft now.
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[Jamie (K)]

I didn't say the high price was justification for theft. All I was saying was that the companies could have minimized theft from the beginning if they hadn't created an intense public desire for their product without adapting their price model to local conditions.

[Molly]

I think it's a "crime" to make us all pay so much for music. IMO, the record companies, distributors and artists are partly responsible for the actions taken by the vendors above.