China has promised to get tougher on copyright and patent violations, a move the Reuters news agency said was long-awaited and may ease US concerns over rampant piracy believed to cost foreign businesses billions of dollars every year.
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In a new interpretation of the law governing intellectual property rights, China’s top court lowered the bar for treating violations as crimes and laid out prison terms of up to seven years for the worst offenders, the report said.
The interpretation, reportedly debated behind closed doors for much of the year, aims to address longstanding complaints by the United States and others that China has done little to stamp out piracy of everything from software to golf clubs.
“We should not only sentence such offenders in a determined manner but also make it economically impossible for the criminals convicted and sentenced to commit the crime again,” Cao Jianming, vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, told Reuters.
Cao reportedly said the court had firmed up legal definitions of terms such as “without permission of the copyright owner” and “reproducing and distributing” to make it easier to prosecute offenders.
A spokesman told Reuters the US embassy had taken note of the news and would examine the text carefully with government departments that follow intellectual property issues – US officials and businesses have complained that so far it has been too difficult to prosecute violators, and successful cases have almost always resulted in modest fines that do little to resolve the problem.
They have also complained that while the central government appears serious about tackling piracy, local officials and police have often been reluctant to act, the report added.
According to Reuters, a report issued by the office of US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, Chinese copyright violations alone cost US companies as much as $3.8 billion a year.
Car companies such as General Motors have complained that Chinese companies have copied their designs, Reuters noted.
It said that the US government has made piracy one of its top trade issues with China, and has pressed Beijing to punish violators with jail terms and even to stage “perp walks,” a publicity tactic that parades perpetrators of crimes in front of news cameras.
