As the Chinese government announced that they will enforce intellectual property rights more strictly in the coming year, many of us were wondering if this was for real, or just a political statement to divert the attention of ‘capitalist’ critics.

After the first three weeks of 2011 gone by, there is certainly no question about the follow up on this new year’s resolution. Several government authorities took measures in the battle against piracy. As we showed earlier this month, the Chinese approach is not half-hearted. File sharing sites clean up their act en masse, as they fear the repercussions may turn out to be draconian. (…)

Early this month, China’s Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued regulations specifying that those spreading other artists' works without authorization will be subject to a criminal penalty of between three and seven years in prison if the actual click rate on the work reaches 50,000 hits. 

Many Chinese file-sharing portals are counting their blessings and have suspended their music and video downloading services over the weekend. For example, access to music channels and movie clips at VeryCD.com have either been blocked or automatically diverted to other Web pages since Saturday., Huang Yimeng, CEO of VeryCD, told the Global Times Sunday that the suspension was aimed at avoiding copyright disputes. "The regulations are getting stricter and we're not able to legally provide a similar amount of content as before. That's why we have to change our content offering," Huang said, admitting that the website was not totally prepared for such a change. Downloading functions on subpig.com and uubird.com, two other similar peer-to-peer file-sharing websites, have also been disabled last night.

Ren Hucheng, a Beijing-based lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights, told the Global Times that the recent shut down of many services could be seen as a sign of progress in the fight against piracy. Now there is more support from the government the cultural sector feel more comfortable to engage in copyright disputes. The procedures are risky and costly and as illegal downloading is very popular in China, may hurt the artist’s reputation.

Recent developments may change public attitude towards filesharing. Baidu.com, a leading music search and sharing website in China, has recently been stalked by people with copyright issues. This week, 27 singers sent a lawyer's letter to Baidu, claiming 6.85 million yuan ($1.04 million) from the search engine for music copyright infringement.

The policy of radical change seems to work, at least on the short run. That is fascinating, since in European or American politics such a rapid change of policy is rare. Mr. Huang: "We hope there is time for transition for dealing with this change of policy, so as to minimize the impact on our users," Mr. Ren ads: "People are used to enjoying free services, and supervising this mass of information online on the longer term is too hard, both economically and technically, for the service provider. It will be interesting to follow closely how this debate develops in the Chinese context.

Source: The China Global Times