Chinese Officials Fight Internet Piracy

Although China is considered to be a fast developing economic and social power, it still has to handle certain issues. Due to the continuous growth of information technology, China now faces the problem of protecting works covered by copyright law. It has been often criticized for not being able to tackle illegal movie and music downloads properly.

Recently China's officials stated that the country looks forward to strengthen control over multimedia that is under copyright law. They mentioned that 205 websites were already closed because of their illegal activity.

They say that in the period between September and January, about 436 cases were investigated. This includes 130 cases made on request of several overseas associations. At the same time 361 violators were ordered to stop their illegal activity.

During a news conference, the deputy director of the National Copyright Administration, Mr. Yan Xiaohong, said that the activity of Internet pirates has already created serious problems to copyright holders, thus leading to a huge number of disputes.

During the latest actions made against Internet offenders, country's officials imposed fines, totaling 705,000 yuan, which is about $ 91,000. They also confiscated 71 servers. Six cases were taken to court, one of which had led to conviction.

Most prominent cases were the ones that dealt with downloading software, textbooks, music and TV shows. One of the glare examples concerns the surprising fact that all Internet cafes in Changchun, a location situated in China's Northeast, were connected to a database of pirate movies.

Because authorized copies are considered to have high prices, Chinese people fearlessly download pirated movies and music. Another reason for illegal download of works protected by the copyright law are the restrictions of the Chinese government regarding cultural imports. For example a significant number of Western movies are not even legally available.

Chinese streets are literally flooded with pirated copies of movies and music. This has lead to aggravation in trade relations between China and the United States.

Official data shows that there are about 843,000 websites and around 140 million Internet users in China. Thus China occupies the second place in the list of the largest Internet markets. Mr. Yan declined to mention the number of sites that are currently providing pirated material. Instead he assured the country's trade partners that China is working hard on the issue.

He said that due to the fast development of China it would be quite hard to manage effectively all cases regarding Internet piracy.
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