Authorities detail effort to shut down violators of others' copyrights

Thousands of websites have been shut down and links to offending sites deleted in a battle against intellectual property infringement, China's copyright watchdog said.

Since a national campaign to protect IP rights began in July, supervisory departments performed 55,000 evaluations of websites, either online or at physical premises, and subsequently closed down 1,655 sites.

Some 274,800 links to the sites were deleted, while law enforcement officers confiscated more than 1.5 million printed books, CDs and DVDs, according to a statement from the National Copyright Administration of China.