Even pirates can fall upon hard times.

It’s not enough to be a run-of-the-mill vendor of counterfeit DVDs in China anymore. Now there's stiffer competition.

We got the first sign at our house that the pirates are getting whacked themselves, so to speak. A friend of my wife’s was visiting the other day and saw a stack of DVDs. She looked at my wife rather incredulously and said, “You still pay for DVDs?”

It turns out the guest has been using websites such as www.plcsky.com and http://bt.mydvdrip.net which offer hundreds of counterfeit movies for free downloading. Only in China! Getting cheap merchandise isn’t enough! Gotta be free.

At one site, I see you can download everything from Oprah to ESPN highlights, as well as a series of Chinese and English-language movies. Among the movies I saw for free download were Firewall, X-Men, Basic Instinct 2 and Angel Eyes.

My office assistant looked at me quizzically when I told her about this. All young people download free movies, she said. The above two websites are only a drop in the bucket of what’s out there, she added.