960409

China piracy worsens

despite pledge

BEIJING: U.S. music and software industry officials on Tuesday painted a bleak picture of piracy in China, saying Beijing had failed to stem the world's leading source of counterfeit compact discs and CD-roms.

China, by failing to keep its 1995 pledge to stamp out rampant piracy of intellectual property products, was stunting its industries and straining already tense Sino-U.S. ties, the industry officials said.

"Despite China's substantial activities thus far, it has failed to control massive illegal production and export of pirated, copyrighted materials," said Jay Berman, chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America.

China had not fully implemented the February 1995 Sino-U.S. intellectual property accord, which staved off billions of dollars of tit-for-tat trade sanctions, Berman and other Alliance members told a Beijing news conference.

"China's many CD plants continue to be the main supplier of pirated works worldwide and the supply of pirated goods is greater today than it was one year ago," Berman said.

He said Chinese officials the U.S. group met in Beijing this week acknowledged that implementation of the 14-month accord needed to be improved.

"Now the issue is political will," Berman said.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance -- a private sector consortium of movie, recording, software and publishing industries -- was in China to back a delegation led by U.S. Deputy Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky.

The executives, while refusing to explicitly call for U.S. trade sanctions to enforce the anti-piracy accord, said China had fallen far short of its commitments despite Beijing claims that well-publicised raids had put pirates out of action.

"The pirated CD-rom factories producing counterfeit software...are still alive and well," said Daniel Burton, policy council chairman of the Business Software Alliance.

"BSA has in fact visited and investigated some of the purportedly closed factories -- they are still open; they are still producing counterfeit product," Burton said.

He reiterated U.S. industry estimates that China's output of music and movie CDs and computer CD-roms was 100 million disks per year, 20 times legitimate domestic demand.

The surplus was pirated goods that were saturating world markets, Burton and other officials said.

"From Beijing to Buenos Aires, entertainment software companies are bleeding from software that originates in China," said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association, a computer game software group.

"All of us prefer results to sanctions," which would be an admission of a failure, Lowenstein said. But he stressed that affected U.S. industries were unwilling to accept less than full Chinese compliance with the anti-piracy pact.

"Negotiating over five plants, 10 plants, 50 plants is meaningless," Lowenstein said. "If and when the illicit CD production stops, then we'll know the agreement is working.

China insists it has done its best to protect intellectual property rights and has publicly destroyed thousands of pirated goods to make its point.

"China has already done quite a lot in resolving this issue and it has made much progress which has been recognised by many parties," Foreign Ministry spokesman Chen Jian told a news conference on Tuesday.

Berman warned that China's failure to solve the piracy dispute would be another negative factor when the U.S. Congress debated granting Beijing Most Favoured Nation trading status later this year.-Reuter