World Intellectual Property Day Activities
BEIJING --- A flurry of activity – including anti-piracy campaigns and a landmark jail sentence – marked World Intellectual Property Day in China on April 26.
On the international front, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) unveiled a movie trailer with an anti-piracy message on April 24. Designed to be screened before the current box office hit The Forbidden Kingdom, the trailer is expected to be seen be more than 10 million theatre-goers within the next two weeks.
The trailer is just one step in a major campaign the MPA has launched to fight piracy in China. The MPA claims piracy in the Asia-Pacific region cost Hollywood studios US$1.2 billion in 2005, compared to US$6.1 billion in lost revenue for all piracy activities across the world. To combat the problem, it has launched a number of activities to educate Chinese nationals on the pitfalls of piracy.
Earlier in the same week, the MPA teamed up with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) to educate Chinese youth on the dangers of illegally sharing files via P2P networks like Emule and BitTorrent. They will distribute 300,000 copies of a booklet called “Respect Creativity, Use Legally” to students at top Chinese universities.
The booklet details the risks involved in using P2P services, such as exposure to viruses, worms and Trojan horses, as well as the detrimental impact on the film industries. The first 300 booklets were distributed to students at an IPR presentation delivered by Liu Binjie, director of the General Administration of Press and Publications, at Renmin University on April 22. The rest will be given to first year students at the start of the new academic year in August.
The MPA has also teamed up with the China Association for Educational Technology (CAET) to launch a competition challenging elementary, middle and high school students to explore IPR issues by creating works in any format they wish. One million students are expected to participate in the competition, which runs from April to June 2008.
Chinese authorities also marked Intellectual Property Rights Day with a show of renewed effort to clamp down on piracy and counterfeiting. Shortly after, 40-year-old Beijing resident Zhou Cheng became the first person in China to be jailed for intellectual property theft, according to Xinhua News. He received a jail sentence and a fine of RMB10,000 (US$1,433) for selling fake DVDs at a store in a supermarket in Beijing’s Chaoyang District.
The Beijing High People’s Court has also announced it will crack down on copyright infringements in internet cafes, after three Beijing local courts ruled on ten related cases in early April.
Leading Chinese film producer Huayi Brothers successfully sued three internet cafes in early April for screening unauthorized versions of Mountain Patrol. The Xicheng District People’s Court ordered the cafes to stop the screenings at once and pay Huayi RMB6,000 (US$859) to RMB8,000 (US$1,146) in compensation. Courts in the Dongcheng and Chaoyang Districts dealt with seven similar cases, including a case where a café was fined RMB23,000 (US$3,295) for screening a pirated version of Huayi hit Assembly.
The cases are a recent phenomenon in China, even though internet cafes are one of the most popular avenues for accessing the internet. Many customers use internet cafes to download and watch pirated films from the web, even though the cafes are subject to licensing laws that require them to register all customers and monitor the sites they surf.
The flurry of lawsuits against internet cafes was filed after the Motion Pictures Association (MPA) and five Hollywood studios sued Beijing Jeebo Interactive Science and Technology for hosting an online interface that offered unauthorized downloads of Hollywood films in internet cafes (see China Media Monitor December).
The two parties settled for an undisclosed amount, but Beijing Jeebo later filed a new lawsuit against the MPA for misrepresenting the terms of the settlement deal on February 28. Jeebo claims the MPA violated the confidentiality clause in the agreement because it publicly announced that Jeebo had apologized for its misconduct, agreed to stop the offending activities and paid a substantial sum in compensation. The Second Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing accepted the case on March 21 but has yet to make a ruling.
China and Russia head the Office of the US Trade Respresentative’s priority watch list of countries that pose the highest threat to intellectual property rights. According to the office’s annual Special 301 Report, levels of piracy and counterfeiting remain extraordinarily high in China, despite some recent progress on IP protection.