Just in case Sony's statement dismissing a Reuters report that pirated copies of Spider-Man 3 had already hit the streets of Beijing weeks before the movie had even opened in the U.S., a follow-up report from the gullible news agency revealed that, unsurprisingly, what you see with Chinese DVD pirates is not always what you get:

A copy bought for 10 yuan — a little over $1 — came with the vendor's caveat that it was "not good quality".

When played in a DVD machine, the screen showed a 2001 television movie "Earth vs. The Spider" starring Dan Aykroyd as a detective investigating the case of a spider-like killer. [...]

"Wait a few days," said a worker at a DVD shop in Beijing's Sanlitun embassy district, who declined to leave her name.

"I'll have a good quality copy for you then," she said, before recommending a pirated copy of Martin Scorsese's "The Departed".

It's but another example of how with piracy, everyone but the pirate loses—particularly the Chinese family man hoping to bring home the best American culture has to offer, only to send his children running screaming from the room when they wrongly assume that in just three short years their teenage webslinging hero has devolved into a smirking, corpulent, middle-aged man.

• Counterfeiters spin Spider-Man web of deceit [Reuters]

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