They hid their money and have been sinking it into the real estate project. Microsoft is paying the woman a lot of money (by the standards of a Chinese sidewalk vendor) to watch the site and keep track of who comes and goes. She has a camera in her stand, and if the software pirates ever show up there and she takes a picture of them, she gets a whopping bonus, plus a free trip to the United States to testify.

Microsoft runs an office in Hong Kong that is devoted to the miserable task of trying to stop software piracy in Asia. In addition to running their undercover operation in the sidewalk stand, they are targeting a number of operations in other countries, which probably provides a foretaste of what's going to happen in mainland China a few years down the road.

Most East Asian countries have sort of a stolen intellectual property shopping mall where people sit all day in front of cheap computers swapping disks, copying the software while you wait - the vaunted just-in-time delivery system. After a few of these got busted, many switched to a networked approach.

One guy in Taiwan is selling a set of 7 CD-ROMs containing hundreds of pirated programs. He has no known name or address, just a pager.

Taiwan, the most technologically advanced part of Greater

China, makes a lot of PCs, all of which need system software, so there the name of the game is counterfeiting, not pirating.

MS-DOS and Windows are, naturally, the main targets.

Microsoft tried to make the counterfeiters' job harder by sealing their packages with holograms, but that didn't stop the

Taiwanese - they made a deal with the Reflective Materials

Institute at, you guessed it, Shenzhen University, which cranked out hundreds of thousands of counterfeit holograms for them.

It often seems that, from the point of view of many entrepreneurial souls in East Asia, the West's tight-assed legal system and penchant for ethical dithering have left many inviting niches to fill.