Recruiting in China

CHINA has closed 205 Websites in a crackdown on video, music and software piracy, authorities said yesterday.

Investigators checked out 436 reports of intellectual property theft between the end of September and January - including 130 complaints from overseas industry associations - and ordered 361 offenders to halt their activities. They also handed out fines totaling hundreds of thousands of yuan and confiscated servers and other equipment.

"Piracy of intellectual property on the Internet has seriously harmed the interests of copyright owners, leading to a large number of disputes and disrupting order on the Internet," Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of the National Copyright Administration, told a news conference in Beijing yesterday.

Authorities imposed fines totaling 705,000 yuan (US$91,000), confiscated 71 servers and transferred six cases to prosecutors for court action, Yan said. One has already led to a conviction, he added.

The overseas complaints came from the Motion Picture Association, the International Federation of Phonographic Industry and the Business Software Alliance, Yan said.

"China treats domestic and foreign copyright holders equally, without discrimination," Yan said. "The administration will prosecute all proven cases of intellectual property infringement."

A Chinese regulation that bans uploading or downloading Internet material without the permission of the copyright holder went into effect last July.

Prominent cases included sites that offered downloads of software, textbooks, music and television shows.

In one case, all the Internet cafes in Changchun in northeast China's Jilin Province were found to be linked to a database of pirated films.

One Website in southern China's Sichuan Province was found to have provided illegal downloads of 400 movies since it was set up in 2004.

Authorities closed the site and fined its operator, Sichuan Telecom, 10,000 yuan. Sichuan Telecom is a subsidiary of the state-run China Telecom Group.

"This latest action had a limited time frame and limited results," Yan acknowledged. "It did not solve all the problems we are facing on the Internet."

China is home to about 843,000 Websites and 140 million Internet users, making it the world's second-biggest Internet market.

The Internet penetration rate in China has developed at lightning speed in recent years. The country's online population is expected to overtake the United States as the world's largest in about two years.

About 210 million of the America's 300 million people are online, according to the US government. China currently has 137 million people online.

Yan said there are 843,000 Chinese Websites at present.