Avast! It's the Dread Pirate Ironybeard!

Well this is just absurd, but at least there’s a silver lining. The Financial Times reports:

A Beijing company has been found guilty of offering unapproved digital versions of eight books written by one of the country’s leading experts on intellectual property rights in what appears to be an extreme example of Chinese online copyright abuse.

Seven of the volumes allegedly made available on the internet by Beijing Scholar Digital Technology were about issues directly relating to piracy, including one entitled Knowing the Enemy and Yourself; Winning the Intellectual Property War.

Pirating books on IP piracy is pretty damned ballsy. Still, it wasn’t so long ago that China was the Mos Eisley of copyright law. It’s good to see their courts finally responding. You can read the complete article here.