Good point. It’s hard to say which are illegal and which are IPR related. I don’t think China wanted to give that number out on purpose…

As for the ratio in light of the Olympics, somehow I don’t think China is going to release those numbers to us… or at best, a number that is made for public consumption. I doubt the government will open that can of worms, especially when it comes to censorship. They aren’t stupid, but that’s just my guess.

Stephen,

I believe they are trying to do more public campaigning. Stan Abrams at China Hearsay had a post about something of that nature yesterday or 2 days ago. Thanks for dropping by!

Tom

I agree with what you said about the incremental progress made by China over the past years in tackling the IP problems. I am not the expert in this area though I am trying to find out more about it. The current dual channel system for IP protection in China shall more or less help business to protect their IP more or less, though there are still a lot to improve. But I also think that the PRC Government shall initiate more public campaign of IP protection and a well educated mass shall minimize the IP violation risks at all.

The first question of the Xinhua article begs the question: what percentage of those 47 million are infringing publications and what percentage are illegal publications? 13 million of the 149 million, or slightly under 10%, illegal publications destroyed last year by the National Office for Cleaning Up Pornography and Fighting Illegal Publications were just a good old-fashioned book burning of politically subversive materials and porn. In the year of the Olympics and the Himalayas, should we assume that this ratio stands or that it has risen or fallen? I’d like to hope that as time passes governments become more stable and less insecure, thus feeling more able to allow the spread of otherwise troublesome expression, so I’m going with stands, but hopefully fallen by a fraction of a percentage point.