Tech Shout!

On Wednesday China spoke about a four month campaign, through which 76 websites have been shut down.

Ofiicials said that since September, 172 cases had been studies including 14 after requests from overseas companies; and 76 had been closed.

In a news conference deputy director of the National Copyright Administration, Yan Xiaohong said, “Internet copyright infringement activities have been increasingly rampant.”

“It has severely disrupted the music, film and software markets,” he added.

Chinese people regularly download pirated music and movies due to the high price of authorised copies and government restrictions on cultural imports, while many Western movies are not even officially available.

Pirated music, movies and software are also sold openly on Chinese streets, a major irritant in trade relations with the United States. Infact China has been often criticized by the West for doing little to tackle widespread music and film piracy from the Internet

Official figures show China now has about 700,000 Web sites and 110 million Internet users, making it the world’s second largest Internet market.

U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman said on Tuesday that China’s failure to implement intellectual property rights was helping inflate the huge U.S. trade gap with China, which hit a record $202 billion last year.

On Wednesday Yan said that China was thinking of signing two new international treaties to help fight digital piracy.

China has tried to pacify the outside world with several crackdowns, tougher law enforcement and new legislation plans. In September, a Beijing court ordered Chinese Web search giant Baidu.com Inc. to stop directing users to Web sites offering peer-to-peer swapping of non-copyrighted
music.

But analysts said the irregular campaigns would not resolve the billions of dollars lost to Chinese piracy as claimed by Hollywood.