Fooled by a Lost pirate

I'm the new owner of a pirated copy of Lost, Season 5.

Not intentionally. When I bid for it on eBay, I believed that it was the real deal. Only when it arrived did I realize that I'd been duped. Fortunately, the seller seems willing to return all of my money, and eBay offers a money-back guarantee when deals go bad.

The experience has been instructive, though. It gave me the chance to compare an authentic product to a fake.

While pirated versions of real movies and TV are sometimes very slick, this one looks like it was done by a guy working night shift at the copy shop, using the cheapest materials and copiers short on toner. The production looks nothing like the original. The printing is sloppy and broken, the packaging primitive. Subtitles in a number of Southeastern Asia languages is another clue. The eBay ad claimed it was the Region 1 (U.S., Canada) version. Not.