BEIJING — American video stores have new-release sections. Chinese video stores have not-yet-released sections.
On a recent weeknight here, four people entered a neighborhood shop, where a clerk escorted them through a back door to a closet-sized room.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves brimmed with some of the latest Hollywood movies, including "Ratatouille," which had just reached Chinese theaters a week earlier and wasn't due out on DVD until January. Also filling the shelves were entire seasons of such popular American TV shows as "Entourage" and "Grey's Anatomy."
Each disc was bootlegged, selling for as little as $1.33.
Closed off from the rest of the store, the room looked hidden. But it's secret to almost no one here -- least of all this group that included two entertainment lawyers from Washington and Hong Kong as well as two representatives of the Motion Picture Assn., the film industry's biggest trade group.
They were there to show a reporter the notorious black-market DVD store, Beijing Yongsheng Century International Cultural Co. It has been raided so often -- 14 times since 2005 -- that it's acquired the nickname "Dan's Shop," after Dan Glickman, chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn. of America.
The store is symbolic of Hollywood's frustration with piracy in the vast and potentially lucrative Chinese market. It epitomizes everything the American film industry considers unfair about the country: a government that turns a blind eye to the flourishing black market while restricting imports of movies, DVDs and music.
About 93% of the movies sold in China are counterfeit -- black-market discs are sold in stores and by legions of roaming vendors who peddle them at subway stations and from their bicycles. Some make home deliveries.
In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, the global film industry lost about $2.7 billion in potential sales to underground DVD sales and Internet movie downloads in China alone, according to research conducted by LEK Consulting on behalf of the Motion Picture Assn. The toll fell most heavily on China's own filmmakers and distributors, while the six American studios that are members of the trade group lost $244 million.
But the U.S. studios see China as a potentially huge market for their films and are lobbying hard to make the country improve copyright protections.
