International Law

This Just In From the MOC

By Stan

Stop me if you’ve heard this before:

According to the requirements of National Working Group for IPR Protection on “2008 IPR Week” activities, the Ministry of Culture decided to develop the 10th national AV market legal publicity week from April 20 to 26. Meanwhile, April 26 was named as a special day for the destruction of illegal audiovisual products.

The legal publicity week aims to further popularize IP knowledge of AV market and its theme is “Protecting IPR and Combating Piracy”.

According to unified plan, audiovisual enterprises and experts will be organized to hold seminar, forum and training course, for upgrading the awareness of safeguarding law of the whole society.

Secondly, publicity spots will be set up to provide education on IP knowledge of AV market and how to recognize pirate products.

Thirdly, all cultural departments are required to enhance the investigation of cases pirating DVD compress discs, vendors selling infringing goods, etc. LINK

Look, I’m not trying to deliberately make fun of the MOC here. It’s nice that they are involved in this public awareness campaign and all. But let’s face it. Advertising, seminars and training courses arranged by MOC will have limited effect. Public education only goes so far.

As I’ve said countless times, your average 13-year-old kid in Ohio who downloads mp3s knows perfectly well it’s illegal. But if he thinks he won’t get caught, then he is going to keep doing it. Human beings are not perfectly moral creatures, and we need to stop pretending that we are.

What would be a better use of resources? Let’s take all that public awareness campaign money and hire a few more cops in Shenzhen or Shanghai that are tasked to the economic crimes department that deals with IP.

Full post as published by China Hearsay on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).