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Chinese say IP crackdown a huge success

By | Published on Wednesday 13 July 2011

China

China says its recent crackdown on piracy has been a big fat success, though as Reuters point out, that’s a claim “borne out by government statistics but not necessarily by a trip to one of Beijing’s many shops where pirated software, movies and clothes are readily available”.

As previously reported, China – a country where intellectual property rights have always been more or less impossible to enforce, leading to rampant physical and online piracy – stepped up its IP laws last year amid pressure the West. The country’s Vice Minister Of Commerce Jiang Zengwei said yesterday that that had led to police shutting down 12,584 operations across the nation that made pirated or counterfeit goods, and 9031 arrests. He added that national government was now only using fully licensed software itself, and was insisting local government follow their lead.

At a press conference Jiang told reporters: “You could say that there still exists some problems with China’s intellectual property rights, but I don’t endorse the idea that it is extremely serious”.

It’s true there have been some improvements since the Chinese government clamped down on piracy. In the music space, file-sharing network VeryCD started filtering out unlicensed content, and search engine Baidu, long criticised for its MP3 search service which linked mainly to illegal music, announced it was launching a licensed service. Though, while copyright owners in the West will recognise even small steps towards nominal revenues from a market that previously delivered nothing is good news, I think few would share Jiang’s optimism regarding just how far China’s new IP rules have gone.



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