More efforts are needed to raise awareness of intellectual
property rights (IPR) protection among the Chinese people,
according to senior government officials.
"I witnessed the establishment of IPR laws in China. It took us
only 20 years to achieve what other countries did in a century, but
the change in people's ideas and perceptions is much slower," said
Xu Jialu, vice-chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC)
Standing Committee.
During the just-concluded 17th National Congress of the
Communist Party of China, at which Chinese President Hu Jintao
promised the implementation of a new "national strategy" on IPR
protection in the near future, China's IPR chief Tian Lipu
reiterated that China needed a long time to get the notion of IPR
into people's heads.
"There is this couple near my home. The husband earns a 50-cent
profit for selling a watermelon and his wife earns the same for
vending a pirated DVD. In their minds, the two things are the same
- they don't know that a DVD is a product with IPR and that right
should be honored," Tian said.
"Ordinarily, people make judgments based on immediate gains and
benefits and we need more efforts to make them regard IPR as a
priority," said Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of the National
Copyright Administration.
China has staged consistent fights against piracy, destroying
pirated books and DVDs in public, trading counterfeit DVDs for
movie tickets and raiding factories churning out fakes. But piracy
is still rampant.
Dr. Prabuddha Ganguli, a consultant to the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO), said, "Another urgent mission for
China besides public campaigns is more vigorous law
enforcement."
"China needs to train a large number of professional enforcers
who can immediately and effectively detect piracy. It also needs to
adopt tougher punitive measures to prevent people from committing
piracy," he said.
IPR protection has risen in importance on China's judiciary
agenda. Since 2001, China's supreme court has ordered the
establishment of special courts for IPR cases across the country
and lowered the threshold to prosecute people manufacturing or
selling counterfeit products.
Statistics from the supreme court indicate that Chinese courts
handled 769 IPR cases in 2006 and prosecuted 1,212 offenders, up
52.2 percent and 62.21 percent respectively from 2005.
"A national strategy on IPR is China's promise to its people and
the world. We mean what we say, and that requires us to be more
engaged in the two aspects of law enforcement and public
awareness," Xu said.
(Xinhua News Agency October 24, 2007)