China is coming down hard on torrent sites

According to an article on the site of China’s state television, CCTV, the country’s government is adopting a tough stance on file-sharing platforms such as bit torrent sites. It has recently closed down more than 500 popular file-sharing platforms.

The entertainment industry in China is increasingly feeling the unfair competition of pirates. The music industry, for example, saw a decrease in the production volume of roughly a third in 2008, for which it blames pirates.

Qiao Xinsheng, professor of Zhongshan Univ. of Economics & Law, said, "If one provides links to download video or audio files that have been copyrighted, it is an infringement of copyright law. But this excludes those not for commercial purposes. But we have to make clear that all the BT websites are totally commercial, no matter how they make money."

In an attempt to create normalised judicial procedures when dealing with copyright in an online environment, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Copyright is cooperating with the courts of law.

As a result of the measures that China has taken, people are regressing to their old, offline way of piracy: buying illegal copies of DVDs. "When they buy DVDs from me, almost everyone talks about being worried that the free movie downloads would disappear," a salesman of pirated DVDs told a China Daily reporter.

24-12-2009