China warns US piracy case will harm trade ties

(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-04-24 10:42

China has made great strides in protecting patents and copyrights and a US complaints over commercial piracy would "seriously harm" cooperation, Vice Premier Wu Yi said on Tuesday.

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Earlier this month, the United States launched two cases at the WTO claiming that Beijing was not doing enough to punish illegal copiers of films and music and that Chinese restrictions on entertainment imports violated trade rules.

China denounced Washington's complaint and, Wu, who heads the country's economic dialogue with Washington, bluntly warned that the complaints would bruise bilateral trade ties.

"The United States Trade Representative, the USTR, has totally ignored the massive strides China has made," Wu told an intellectual property forum in Beijing.

The US action "flies in the face of the agreement between the two country's leaders to propose dialogue as a way of settling disputes," Wu said, adding that never before had a WTO member simultaneously mounted two cases against another country.

"This will have an utterly negative impact and will inevitably badly damage bilateral intellectual property cooperation," she said, also warning it would "harm" cooperation over market access issues.

On Monday, China sought to demonstrate its determination to stop commercial piracy by releasing an intellectual property action plan.

China would draft and implement 14 laws on intellectual property rights and usage, and issue explanations and guiding policies for handling IPR violation cases, according to the notice.

Wu pointed out that 988 people were arrested for IP infringement last year and that courts heard 6,441 IP cases.

"Over the last few years, the amount of manpower and work that China has put into protecting intellectual property rights and the results that have been achieved, have been unprecedented," she said.

"Every year we have nationwide events to protect intellectual property and we have always kept up the pressure on the pirates. The effects of this clean-up get better every year."

However, Wu admitted a lot of work lay ahead.

"At the moment, China's burden is heavy and the road is long, with relatively little of its own intellectual property, weak competitiveness, continuous piracy disputes and a prominence of fake products," she said.

"It's cheap to pirate goods, but expensive to protect copyright ... and society as a whole does not know enough about the problem," Wu added.



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