I had written before about IPR week, but April 26th is the official worldwide day of IPR protection. As China makes a show of cracking down on piracy, World Intellectual Property day is the perfect time to hold large public events. I bet most of them even had big red inflatable arches. From one of the Nanjing daily newspapers, Public Square Publicizes “Intellectual Property”. (translated by me, so if there are any translation problems let me know)

Yesterday, 4/26, was “World Intellectual Property Day”, and the Provincial Industry and Commerce Bureau, the Copyright Bureau and other departments in Nanjing held a publicity and advisory event on Shangxi Road, with the related departments accepting 152 complaint cases. As an authority from a Beijing software company at the event told this reporter, software is the the most pirated industry, although the loses are difficult to calculate.

Is it that surprising that an authority from a software company would say that software piracy is the most widespread problem? Although he is correct that piracy loses are difficult to calculate, this is true for any industry. And I have to wonder what exactly was given to the authorities as complaints. Other then suspicions that your neighbor is running a DVD factory, what are they telling them that isn’t already apparent just by walking down the street.

Of course these kind of events were held throughout China. In Xiangfan, Hubei province, the authorities staged a standard steamroller rolling over DVDs event. I will never understand why they use a machine that is designed to make things flat to run over flat objects. I think a wood chipper makes a better point. And in one of the more bizarre piracy crack down cases, from a humorously titled China Daily article, Police pluck bird flu research base to find DVD pirates

NANCHANG - Chinese police have nabbed a pirate DVD production and sales ring that had concealed their operation in a supposed bird flu research base in east China’s Jiangxi Province.

Zheng Deming, head of the provincial anti-pornography and anti-illegal publications office, said police in Jiangxi, Hubei and Guangzhou seized at least 16 alleged members of a fake DVD ring which has produced and sold about 26.4 million DVDs in two years.

It goes on that to say that the owners scared away local residents by telling them that it was a flu research facility, and locked the factory doors and would not let the workers out during the day. Why isn’t this case getting more attention in the United States? It has two things the media loves, bird flu and Chinese factories.

I hope everyone had a good IPR week and day, and will conclude with a statistic, once again from China Daily. It is hard to say what will happen with piracy in China in the coming years, but I think it will be interesting to watch.

Statistics from China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate show that in 2006, 1,224 people were arrested on intellectual property rights infringement charges, up 44.9 percent over 2005. In the first quarter this year, 578 more offenders were arrested on intellectual property rights charges, up 19.4 percent over the figure last year.

Popularity: 74% [?]