Welcome to Pirate DVD Heaven

It's the back corner of the third floor of a central Jakarta shopping centre, which I will refer to only as: Pirate DVD Heaven.

It has pretty much everything you could want. The latest blockbusters? Check. European arthouse? Check. Obscure 1980s horror films? Strangely, yes.

Scores of people - Indonesians, expats and tourists - cram into the spot to flick frantically through the massive collections. Some leave with hundreds of discs.

In Australian terms, it's about a dollar a disc, which seems to be the going rate throughout much of Asia.

But while stall jockeys in other Asian pirate hotspots peddle some real crap - back of the cinema stuff - the Indonesian sellers are strangely scrupulous.

If you reach for a DVD that's not a top notch copy, they will tell you - and urge you to wait a few weeks until the good version arrives.

Almost as entertaining as the movies themselves are the sleeves they're sold in.

DVD piracy is a sophisticated business, but some of the black market cover designers don't have very sophisticated English.

Critic's quote on the sleeve of Burn After Reading: "Perfectly good, but never truly great."

Now, I don't disagree. But it's not the kind of thing you usually see on DVD sleeves.

How about this gem, on the cover of The Reader: "Succeeds solely due to the performance of Kate Winslet".

Again, it's accurate, but unorthodox.

Of course, there is a serious side to all this. Piracy robs the film industry of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It also makes some dodgy characters very rich.

But Indonesians have a pretty compelling excuse to buy illegal.

"I support piracy," one told me. "Because of the censorship on official DVDs - it's really annoying."

I can attest to that. A few years ago I purchased a legitimate Indonesian copy of Brokeback Mountain. During a certain pivotal scene in a tent - when Ennis first succumbs to Jack's advances - the DVD abruptly cut to a shot of Jake Gyllenhaal's character behind the wheel of his pick-up truck, driving through the mountains.