Walk down Sukhumvit Road, where I live, and you can buy clothing by Polo and Camel, Swiss army knives, Nike and Reebok sports shoes, and tee-shirts advertising the Hard Rock Cafe and popular English football clubs. There are at least fifty stores where Indian proprietors (who also own much of the real estate) sell knock-off designer suits, measured on the spot and slapped together with a second fitting a few hours later, delivery in less than a day—stitched by hundreds of poor citizens and immigrants (both legal and otherwise) sitting at rows of sewing machines in factories the length of football fields on the city’s industrial fringe. There’s even a store on Sukhumvit called Versaces; I suppose the owner thinks the “s” at the end of the name circumnavigates any smear of illegitimacy. Markets and street stalls and shops in fancy malls from Chiang Mai to Pattaya to Phuket offer more—Rolex watches, French perfumes, the newest movies, DVDs, video games, gold jewelry, Gucci purses, even, god help us, Viagra. Every item a fake.
“The Thais are not innovators,” a friend says. “They created one of the best cuisines in the world, taking a little of this and that from here and there—the chilis from Portuguese traders, the curries from India—and made it something unique. Beyond that, there isn’t much to brag about. That may sound unkind, but the truth is, what Thailand is good at is copying. With or without permission.”
To some, this means counterfeiting. Violating international intellectual property laws. Stealing. The simplest word is theft and the most popular word in the press is “piracy.”
An effort was exerted to halt this. Police arrested thousands of vendors a year and in 2003 shut down nineteen factory owners; photographs appeared regularly in the press showing phoney products being flattened by heavy equipment. (Leading many counterfeiters operating in malls to employ spotters at the mall entrances who send an alert by cell phone when the cops show up, causing thousands of counterfeit discs to disappear from open view.) When the United States threatened to delay Free Trade Area negotiations with Thailand if the Thai government failed to make progress on intellectual property issues, the prime minister said he had thirteen state agencies involved in the suppression of copyright violations. Thailand further offered US$25,000 to informants for compact disc copying machines and cops were promised more than five U.S. cents for every pirated CD seized. Even when a coalition of popular performers appealed to their fans to stop buying bogus CDs, because the forgers were making it impossible for them to earn a living, the effort was ineffectual.
The counterfeit trade remained so untouched, in fact, that local producers cut prices, between twenty and fifty percent for CDs and VCDs and the license holder for such cartoon characters as Snoopy, Popeye and Garfield re-priced their product to five percent above the fakes—giving consumers some insight as to how large the original profit margins had been and why so much bootlegging was going on in the first place. It was, both pirates and consumers agreed, as if a Southeast Asian sort of Robin Hood were stealing from the rich to give the poor.
This cuts to the core of the matter. When a copy of Microsoft Office for an individual user cost over 15,000 baht, and Windows, the basic operating system, was sold at almost 10,000 baht, and a copy of the photo-editing software Adobe Photoshop went for 30,000 baht, and the average Thai university graduate entering the civil service received a starting monthly salary of 6,400 baht, it should have been no great surprise to anyone when the copied software found a ready market.
Nowhere was this clearer than in one of the least known and most intriguing museums in Bangkok, in the offices of Tilleke &
Gibbons International Ltd., which, despite its farang name, is the oldest law firm in Thailand, owned and operated by Thais. The firm has what it calls an “intellectual property” team and here is displayed in some of the hallways the evidence from hundreds of cases, some 1,500 exhibits in all. The thing that struck me the first time I saw it was how diverse the items were. The purses and belts, the cosmetics, the clothing, the watches, the music, the stuff you see on the street I expected. But pharmaceuticals? (Oh, yes, I was assured; did I realize how much ersatz Viagra was sold each day in Bangkok?) Electric irons? Johnny Walker Black? Cigarettes? Laundry detergent? Automobile tires? Engine parts? Motor oil? Veterinary medicine?
Thailand is not alone, of course. Throughout Asia and in other parts of the “developing” world, counterfeit goods are as much a part of the marketplace as exotic fruits and vegetables and live catfish flopping in plastic tubs. According to annual studies by the industry trade group, Business Software Alliance, Vietnam and China lead the world with the highest level of pirated software—including CDs, videos, and games—at an astonishing ninety nine percent. That meant that for every legitimate disc or video for sale in those countries, ninety-nine fakes were on the market, and being sold at a fraction of the legal market price.
So good were the Vietnamese at counterfeiting, that in 2000, the Ministry of Culture and Information announced that local painters duplicated international masterpieces so believably, that from that time forward they had to make the copies three centimeters smaller or larger than the originals. And sign their work under the copied signatures of the original masters. At the time, a credible “Van Gogh” was going for about US$250.
Similarly in China, the porcelain market was doing so well, skilled potters were producing fake Ming, Qing and Song pieces that were fooling some of the experts.
Thailand was not far behind. There were in Bangkok and Ayutthaya sculptors so skilled they produced convincing copies of religious statuary, while others carved wooden figures and, after burying them in the ground and treating them with various chemicals, sold them as the real thing. Years before moving here, I once visited Thailand with a developer from Hawaii who wanted to purchase authentic artifacts for display in his fancy new hotels. Wary of being cheated, he hired a local antiquities scholar, who evaluated the items offered for sale. It wasn’t until he returned home that the developer learned his expert okayed bogus items in exchange for a kickback from the counterfeiters.
Most of the piracy is of cheaper items that are mass produced. My son is a computer graphics designer in the U.S. and when he first visited me in Bangkok, I took him to Pantip Plaza, the five-story mall on Petchburi Road devoted mainly to computers and other electronic devices, and software. Our first visit, he was stunned. For an hour or more, all I heard was, “Dad, I paid thirty dollars for that! I paid a hundred dollars for that!” And so on. Never pointing at anything that cost more than a few dollars. When Windows XP, the latest endeavor by Microsoft to separate consumers from their money, appeared in shops the end of 2001, costing almost as much as a PC, copies were flying off the Pantip shelves at two hundred baht (five dollars) apiece.
Even pornography is bootlegged in Thailand. One of the street stalls outside my bank on Silom Road openly sold XXX videos. (The bank moved, the stall remained.) This was just one of several operating in that neighborhood during the day, one of dozens offering the same product at night. The reproduction was sometimes poor—there were incomplete scenes (talk about coitus interruptus !), bad focus or color, etc.—but the $2.50 price was right, for a video that cost ten or more times that amount in the country of origin.
Counterfeiting, bootlegging, copying, call it whatever you want, it’s practically unavoidable, and so affordable it’s irresistible. I’m wearing fake Calvin Klein undershorts. Some of the Polo shirts in my wardrobe are fake. My last pair of slippers said Nike but it was a lie. (And they lasted only two months before falling apart, one of the risks of buying funny goods; there is a joke about the Rolex watch you buy in Bangkok is guaranteed to last as long as it takes to get to the airport on your way home.)