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China signs agreement to crack down on piracy

Leader: The National Copyright Administration of China has signed an agreement today with four industry trade groups in the US and UK, saying that they will investigate piracy complaints and work closely with the groups in the future.

China signed a memorandum of understanding today with several trade associations in the UK and US, agreeing to keep a better eye on copyright infringement and piracy in the country. The memorandum, Establishment of a Coordination Mechanism For Online Copyright Protection, was signed in Beijing by the National Copyright Administration (NCA) of China.

The four associations involved in the agreement were the Motion Picture Association of America and the Association of American Publishers in the US, and the Business Software Alliance and The Publishers Association in the UK. These groups have agreed to provide the NCA a list of items that they wish to see protected, such as movies, video and audio, software, and published works.

The NCA has, in return, agreed to investigate reported cases of piracy and keep in regular communication with the trade groups regarding copyright issues. Xu Chao, director of the NCA's copyright department, said in a briefing in Beijing, "China now has the world's second largest number of Internet users, therefore it is important to promote the awareness and understanding of the public that using pirated publications is wrong, and this is one of the reasons for the signing of the memorandum."

China has been under pressure to crack down harder on copyright infringement for some time now. Last year, the US got fed up with China's apparent inaction on the issue and went to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to try to get information on what, exaclty, China was doing to work against piracy. Some movie studios, such as Fox and Warner Bros., have tried new marketing strategies in China in order to beat pirates at their own game by selling very low-cost DVDs in hopes of making money off of sales that would otherwise go to pirates. Bill Gates, however, voiced his "optimism" at the beginning of this year that software piracy in China should be mostly under control within ten years, but perhaps if the NCA actually follows through with this agreement, such resolution to piracy issues in the country may come sooner than later.