Official: China a main victim of CD piracy
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-04-13 14:39

China, often criticized for intellectual property infringement on a grand scale, says it is in fact the world's main victim of compact disc piracy.

Hundreds of millions of fake CDs enter the country across its porous borders, winding up in Chinese shops and hurting its reputation abroad, according to Wang Ziqiang, spokesman of the National Copyright Administration.

"China is the largest victim of pirated CDs," he told a briefing organized by the State Council Information Office in Beijing. "Such activities jeopardize the Chinese economy, hurt our tax revenue and also jeopardize the Chinese image in front of the world."

He said that in the period since 1996 Chinese customs have confiscated a total of 300 million pirated CDs, "the vast majority" of them coming from abroad.

State media reported previously that smugglers often transport 4 million CDs at a time on board cargo ships, ensuring that Chinese audiences can enjoy all the latest movies and music.

In a major recent case, police in southern Guangdong province confiscated 4.77 million smuggled discs.

Wang said the CDs probably originate in neighboring countries but declined to identify them.

China has so far only engaged in cooperation with customs authorities of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to crack down on smuggling the CDs, he said.

Even in cases where CDs are proven to have been produced in China, the equipment was imported from abroad, he said.

In the period since 1996, Chinese officials uncovered 182 illegal CD assembly lines, all of them of foreign origin, he said.

"Chinese companies currently have no capability to manufacture such assembly lines," he said.

One of China's commitments to the World Trade Organization is that intellectual property rights have to be better protected.

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