China claims "great progress" in anti-piracy fight

BEIJING (Reuters) - China, where fake DVDs and designer gear are on sale on most street corners, has made great progress fighting intellectual property piracy but people still have a low awareness of the problem, officials said on Thursday.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the trade in pirated consumer goods has reached $200 billion a year, equivalent to 2 percent of world trade, with many fakes coming from China.

Washington and Brussels have expressed their displeasure with Beijing numerous times over the problem, and it has proven a major irritant in trade and political ties.

China says it is trying hard to tackle piracy.

"In 2007, China made great progress in the field of intellectual property work," the State Council, or Cabinet, said in a statement.

"The efforts of customs, public security and cultural departments in tackling intellectual property rights infringements have achieved remarkable results," it added.

Yin Xintian, spokesman for the State Intellectual Property Office, reeled off a list of numbers to prove the point, revealing that in 2007 more than 4,000 people were prosecuted for piracy and some 52 million pirated audiovisual discs seized.

Yet he admitted China faced an uphill struggle.

"China is a country which has only had an intellectual property rights' protection system for a short period of time, just 20 years or so, and people don't know as much about the matter as in Western nations," Yin told a news conference.

"It's natural that there will be some piracy."

Despite China's strengthening of the legal system and numerous highly publicized anti-piracy campaigns, complete with televised burnings of fake DVDS and so on, pirated goods remain openly available.

Xu Chao, Deputy Director General National Copyright Administration, said it was often not as simple as it seemed to close such stores.

"Many malls let out counters, and each counter is essentially run independently, and if they do something illegal you'd have to shut the whole mall. So this is a complicated question," Xu said.

Luxury goods maker Gucci this week won a trademark copycat lawsuit against a Chinese shoemaker, the second such case by an upmarket European firm after Italian confectioner Ferrero won a case against a chocolate counterfeiter last week.

(Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)