The software industry in China generated 1.3 trillion yuan in output last year due to the government's ongoing efforts in combating piracy and promoting authorized software, according to information released by the National Copyright Administration (NCA).
The Chinese government has been paying great attention to the healthy development of software industry, which is regarded as the country's basic, pioneering and strategic industry. Since 2001, NCA has been working with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Finance and the Government Offices Administration of the State Council to actively promote the use of legitimate software in governmental departments and enterprises and to strictly crack down upon software piracy, such as illegal pre-installation of computer software.
The work to weed out pirated software in governmental authorities has achieved initial results so far, with 135 central and national departments having eliminated illegal software by the end of May and 67 of them having also rooted out software piracy in their subordinate institutions at the same time. As many as 176,763 sets (number of licenses) of authorized software, including operating systems, office software and antivirus software, have been purchased, valued at 140.91 million yuan.
So far governmental departments at both central and local levels have spent 377.14 million yuan purchasing 381,807 sets of genuine software. Local governments are required to eliminate the use of pirated software by the end of October.
Regarding the efforts in fighting against copyright infringement and piracy, by June this year, competent authorities across China have filed 3,381 relevant cases involved 283 million yuan, imposed administrative penalties in 2,696 cases therein and transferred 179 cases to judicial organs to pursue criminal liabilities. In the mean time, they have also destroyed 1,548 dens and confiscated 3.133 million pieces of items, effectively deterring copyright infringement and piracy.
(Source:IPR in China)
