BEIJING (AFP) - China said Thursday it faced “very big difficulties” coping with rampant piracy on the Internet and called for international help to make an ongoing crackdown more effective.
“To evade punishment, pirates often locate their servers in other countries or regions, posing very big difficulties for police efforts to carry out (a) crackdown,” said Gao Feng, a senior public security ministry official.
“Copyright infringements, by their very nature, are international crimes. To effectively curb such activities, (we) need enhanced international cooperation on law enforcement,” he said.
Analysts said technically it was very hard for Chinese authorities to block websites that run on servers abroad as they do not have access to the registration information of the servers and thus cannot identify the pirates.
“It’s difficult to block these websites completely … as it’s hard to arrest a person responsible if he lives in a foreign country,” Liu Bin, a Beijing-based analyst with technology consultancy firm BDA China, told AFP.
So one way for foreign countries to help China in its endeavour would be by sharing the registration information of local servers to help find the pirates, he said.
“Copyright infringement is a clampdown target in many countries, so such cooperation should be possible,” he said.
In a campaign launched in August, authorities have investigated 1,001 online copyright infringement cases, more than the combined number in 2005 and 2006, said Yan Xiaohong, the National Copyright Administration vice minister.
Nearly 900,000 yuan (124,000 dollars) in fines were meted out, with 339 illegal websites closed down and 123 servers confiscated, he said.
In one case, the Beijing-based Jinhudong Corporation illegally authorized other companies to use more than 1,000 movies, raking in illegal gains in excess of 16 million yuan, according to previous state media reports.
But China has also been criticised for seeking to impose curbs on Internet content that are as strict as its restrictions on the print media.
For example, it announced earlier this month that only state-controlled entities would be allowed to operate websites that post audio-visual content.