This is a succint and well-written book introducing a truly interdisciplinary approach to the study of copyright and related issues in contemporary popular culture in relation to the current development of Asian cinema, and questions how copyright is appropriated to regulate culture. It examines the many meanings and practices pertaining to "copying" in cinema, demonstrating the dynamics between globalization’s desire for cultural control and cinema’s own resistance to such manipulation.

Focusing on the cinema of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and film 'piracy' in these countries, the book argues that ideas of cultural ownership and copyright are not as clear-cut as they may at first seem, and that copyright is used as a means through which cultural control is exercised by the cultural big business of the dominant power.