Mr and Mrs Xiao now spend their days watching pirated DVDs
leftover from their business that was shut down a month ago. The
couple had their licence revoked for selling pirated video products
in a market in Shenyang's Sanhao Street.
In order to clean up the audio and video product market and
better protect intellectual property rights (IPR), China's State
Council launched a large-scale operation last year to crack down on
IPR infringements nationwide.
Dozens of governmental departments were involved in the
crackdown, including the Ministry of Commerce, local publication
administrations, the police and customs agencies, in major cities
such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Liaoning Province.
Shenyang's Sanhao Street was one of their main targets in
northeast China's Liaoning Province, where piracy is
widespread.
There are two major pirated audio and video product selling
areas in Shenyang. One is in the south of the city on Sanhao Street
and the other is in the Science and Technology Park of Liaoning
University situated in the north part of Shenyang, said Wang
Hongyu, head of Shenyang Anti-Pirated Enforcement Team, in a recent
interview.
"These two centres provided over 90 percent of all pirated
compact disks (CD) to the city residents. But now you can hardly
find any pirated products there," said Wang.
The two markets involved in selling pirated audio and video
products were closed down and 79 businesses had their licences
revoked for selling pirated products.
Over 1.1 million audio-visual discs were confiscated and then
later destroyed.
"In order to continue striking pirated CDs and DVDs, we have
jointly formed a law enforcement team to monitor these markets
around-the-clock everyday," Wang said.
His claim was backed by Wang Yi, once a regular consumer of the
pirated products. He said that it is now hard to find pirated
DVDs and software in Shenyang.
"You can now hardly see pirated CDs in the markets. And we will
keep a close eye on these markets to ensure that they don't come
back again," Wang Hongyu said.
With the disappearance of pirated products, the legal audio and
video product dealers are benefiting directly from the
campaign.
"My sales tripled in the past month compared with those before
November. And I plan to order a larger range of products after
Spring Festival," said Chen Tong, a software dealer in Sanhao
Street.
"If piracy can be controlled and more customers purchase our
copyrighted products, we can provide more of these products for
cheaper prices in return in the future," said Feng Hongtao, manager
of Dongke Audio and Video Chain Store.
However, some insiders are not so optimistic about the
future.
"Still, there is a big gap in the prices between legal and
pirated products. Customers will turn to the latter if the gap
still exists and stays so large," said a pirated products dealer,
surnamed Tang who declined to give her full name.
Most of the pirated computer games, DVDs, and some software
products are sold under 10 yuan (US$1.25) in Sanhao while the legal
ones cost over 100 yuan (US$12).
"I don't think customers will abandon pirated products as their
price is five to 10 times cheaper while the quality is similar,"
said Tang.
Mark Cohen, the intellectual property attache of the US Embassy
in Beijing, once agreed that China has made a big effort to crack
down on piracy and improve public awareness of IPR protection.
But he also agreed that it is not an easy task.
"The point is that the government can only encourage IPR
protection. But it should help individuals protect their goods by
themselves," he said.
There are two solutions to this, one is to stop piracy and the
other is to provide legal products.
China keeps working on improving the protection legislation with
judiciaries adopting a more hard line approach for IPR
violators.
It has made clear that offenders pirating more than 250,000
yuan's (US$30,000) worth of copyrighted products can be jailed for
up to seven years.
Since the beginning of the campaign, Chen has been providing
more discounts on legal products to encourage more legitimate
sales.
"If the government gets rid of pirated products and we provide
cheaper legitimate ones, the future market will become more
promising," said Chen.
(China Daily February 6, 2006)