Government and Policy

Google urged to respect IPR

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-02-03 14:00
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BEIJING: Chinese intellectual property rights (IPR) authorities said on Wednesday that information transmission on the Internet should be prevented if it is found to be violating China's IPR regulations, especially copyright, referring to the Google issues in China.

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Yin Xintian, spokesman of the State Intellectual Property Office, said that it had been China's consistent stance.

He was responding to a question about Google's threat to retreat from China over Internet management disputes, at a press conference on the amendment to the implementation rules of the Patent Law.

"Information flow on the Internet should follow the basic principle of respecting and protecting the intellectual property rights of others," he said.

Google was involved in a lingering dispute with the China Writers Association (CWA) before it threatened last month to pull out of China, saying it was no longer satisfied with filtering search results.

In October 2008, the China Written Works Copyright Society revealed about 18,000 titles by 570 Chinese writers had been scanned by Google and put in its online library. The authors were neither informed nor paid.

According to a list provided by Google at the end of 2009, its online library had 80,000 categories of Chinese books, 10 percent of which were works of CWA members.