Govt to strengthen IPR infringement fight in new areas

China will continue to the fight against intellectual property infringements and counterfeiting, focusing now on the rural-urban fringe and e-commerce platforms, a senior official said in Beijing on Friday.

"It has been a major trend in recent years that incidents of IPR infringement and counterfeiting are shifting to the rural-urban fringe areas and to e-commerce platforms. So we will maintain our focus in those areas," said Chai Haitao, deputy director of the Office of the National Leading Group for Combating IPR Infringement and Counterfeiting, said in a news conference on Friday.

IPR protection in the field of cross border e-commerce will be a major focus for the authorities, he said.

Authorities nationwide investigated more than 112,700 cases of IPR infringements and counterfeiting in the first nine months of this year, Chai said. The police also nabbed more than 20,000 suspects related to the cases during that period, among them 15,700 have been indicted.

The authority is also set to launch another special campaign against the counterfeiting of products from December to June 2015. Chai says the focus is to crack down on the counterfeiting of products in the rural and rural-urban fringe areas.

Yu Cike, director of the copyright department under the National Copyright Administration, said at the conference that the authority will continue its efforts to prevent the use of counterfeit software at government departments and institutions.

According to Yu, one of the problems with government departments switching to legitimate copies of software is that some government departments purchased legitimate copies of software, often at higher than market prices, but still ended up using other brands of software.