China's customs and public security authorities will hold regular joint meetings to combat intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement, the Shanghai Evening Post reported on Thursday.

The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and China's General Administration of Customs (CGAC) jointly issued a regulation on stepping up cooperation in IPR-related law enforcement recently, the paper said.

The regular joint meeting will be held once a year and other temporary joint meetings will be held while important IPR infringement clues are discovered.

"For major IPR infringement cases, including those involving transnational criminal gangs, the two government departments will consult with each other for detailed cooperation," MPS sources were quoted by the paper as saying.

According to the regulation, as long as CGAC discovered major clues of IPR infringement, the CGAC will inform the MPS - then MPS will decide the timetable to file the case.

Thanks to a national drive against piracy, Chinese customs have cracked a growing number of counterfeiting cases, a rise of 30 percent annually since China's entry into the WTO in Dec. 2001.

"About 1,210 piracy trade cases, involving 99.78 million yuan (12.3 million U.S. dollars), were cracked in 2005, and 88.3 percent of them were involved in exports," Gong Zheng, CGAC deputy director, said on Monday.

Meanwhile, the police have detained 2,119 suspects for intellectual property rights violations in 2005, an increase of 56 percent from a year before, said Zheng Shaodong, assistant minister of Public Security,

Source: Xinhua