"Asia is like this: totally Windows, totally pirated.
Every Chinese university uses a pirated, ghosted copy of Windows
and MS Office. The original CDs came from Russian crackers, or so I
was told at one point. Imagine the difficulty of a foreign English
teacher trying to explain why attribution and citation is necessary
for my students. Imagine the giggles (not really, the Chinese
students don't giggle in class) when you explain copyright and
trademarks and patents in this environment.
"Two years later I went to Thailand. It was, if anything, worse.
Every computer in Thailand ran a pirated copy of everything. Every
computer plaza had a number of software stores that sold anything
you wanted for $2.50 a CD. Some CDs had thousands of dollars of
software. Adobe CS 3 I remember was available within hours of its
release for $6.00 for the DVD. How can you teach honesty, IP,
copyright and all the rest of the framework of intellectual honesty
in an environment like this?"