China officially launched its 2005 summer campaign on Intellectual Property Rights (IPT) in Beijing Sunday, for its prologue for its summer war on IPT sponsored by eight government departments, including the Office of the National "Anti-pornography Working Group, the Ministry of Culture, the Press and Publication Administration and the General Administration of Customs.

According to Liu Binjie, deputy head of the national work team on cracking down on pornographic and illegal publications, China will carry out its 2005 summer action on IPR in 13 cities, such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang and Laizhou from June 20 to Aug. 31 to crack more IPR infringement cases and investigate distribution network and production bases of pirated products.

Despite much progress made in the past few years, Liu noted that China still faces a "stark" situation in combating counterfeiters as pirated DVD of TV production or movies keep increasing.

Counterfeiters have been increasingly sophisticated and are building their own brands by expanding their production and sales network, he said, adding that "IPR protection and cracking pirated audio and visual product cases have become ever more important."

Zhang Qin, deputy director of the State Intellectual Property Office, acknowledged that China faced a difficult task trying to improve IPR protection and the biggest challenge was weak public awareness as a white paper on IPR the country the country had released two months ago said.

"We only have a history of some 20 years in IPR protection so many people are still not acquainted with the concept of IPR," he said. "To enable those people to understand IPR in a very short period of time is a hard task."

While carrying out the campaign in this regard, the government will work very hard to increase public awareness, Zhang said. "The economic growth of China requires innovation and inventions. That means IPR protection is prerequisite."

Liu Binjie said the government will try to improve international cooperation on IPR and enhance social education on the importance of IPR protection, whereas the public can report piracy cases on the phone to the work team or the Ministry of Public Security and log on the work team's website.

China confiscated 175 million pirated audio and visual products last year, a biggest chunk of all pirated publications seized, according to officials at the launching ceremony of the 2005 summer campaign against intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement here Sunday.

Liu said China seized 229 million illegal publications in 2004, 213 million or 93 percent of which are counterfeit ones.

Among the pirated publications, audio and visual products took the first place, followed by 24.4 million books and 13.74 million electronic publications and software, he said.

In last year's campaign on IPR, 690,000 markets or stores selling publications were inspected and more than 40,000 closed for distributing illegal publications, involving 12.06 million pornographic publications and 21 pirated CD/DVD production lines.

In a decade From 1994 to 2004, Chinese police confiscated more than 800 million pirated audio and visual products and 200 DVD production lines, and approximately 40 million yuan (about 4.8 million US dollars) was awarded to those who reported the cases.

Source: Xinhua