Stan Abrams, one of the first China law bloggers who took a couple years off recently to get another degree and is now back in China with DLA Piper, has a good post on valuations placed within IP enforcement statistics in China.

Stan says:

I bet if you could go back to the earlier incarnation of my Chinablawg, back in 2003 I think, you could find posts in which I complained that lobbying groups were playing fast and loose with valuation numbers to make their losses look bigger. This is how it works: when a lobbying group, such as the Motion Picture Association of America, goes to the U.S. Congress to testify on China’s enforcement of IP rights, they want to make things sound as scary as possible so that perhaps the US government might actually do something to help them. Makes sense.

What that often means is that they start with a number of, let’s say, estimated illegal sales of DVDs. Now comes the fun part. You then have to deem a per unit value on each DVD. What do you use? Well, one way is to go with the sales price of a legal DVD sold by a valid distributor in the same market. Sounds reasonable, particularly to some staffer in the U.S. Congress who reviews the testimony of the lobbyist.

I'm been in Hong Kong and Macau since last Friday and head to Shanghai Tuesday night. I was in a tech store off Lockhart Road yesterday and found pirated copies of Vista for HKD120. Bootleg copies of various versions of Maya, which retail for thousands of U.S. dollars, were going for about HKD80-160.

On Macau: our China Hospitality News monthly bilingual magazine has been focusing more on the MICE opportunities in Macau and I made a visit to the Cotai Strip to see the progress underway for the Venetian. It's huge. Also visited Sands and Wynn, with a side trip out to Fernando's on the beach. MGM is slated to open in a month. I have colleagues heading to Macau about twice a month, and I think I will start heading there more myself too.