Police in South China's piracy-plagued Guangdong Province have built good relationship with enterprises and exchanged information with foreign countries to crack down the IPR violations.

"We've set up IPR protection liaison system with key enterprises in the province, providing guidelines and free consultancy to enhance their awareness of IPR protection," said He Guangping, deputy director of Guangdong Public Security Bureau.

He said this at the two-day forum on IPR protection sponsored by the Ministry of Public Security in Shenzhen, which ended on Wednesday (July 25).

In March, Guangdong police assisted their British counterparts in investigating into bank accounts of several suspects.

Official statistics showed that public security departments in Guangdong have filed and investigated 1,265 IPR cases since 2001, 925 of which have been successfully concluded and 1,891 suspects detained. The total value involved in these cases was estimated at 1.5 billion yuan, of which 200 million yuan has been recovered.

Gao Feng, deputy director of Economic Crime Investigation Department of Ministry of Public Security, said in the same forum that central government's anti-counterfeit actions are aimed at rooting out the crimes.

Government figures showed that Chinese law enforcement authorities have seized 231 illegal production lines for making counterfeit CDs since the first one was found in Guangdong in 1996 and arrested 510 persons. All the production lines were illegally imported from other countries, he said.

The effort could reduce the making of counterfeit CDs by 220 million a year.

"We acknowledge that piracy is still rampant in China. It's Chinese companies' social responsibility to fight against piracy, which should be the same for all the companies in the world," Gao Feng, said in a press conference on the sideline of the forum.

"We hope the international society could urge the production line manufacturers to set up a system to put their products on record," Gao said. "It could greatly increase the cost for the criminal and help us crack down on the illegal facilities," he added.

Talking about the mainland's sincere initiative in combating piracy, he said China and United States had set up an IP criminal enforcement working group in March, which is dedicated to increasing cooperation in intellectual property law enforcement efforts and pursuing more joint US-China cross-border criminal enforcement operations.

Gao said China is willing to cooperate with other countries and regions on this issue by overcoming the difference in legal systems.

Chinese and US police just achieved a successful joint action on cracking down high-quality software piracy from July 6 to 16 by strengthening the information exchange.

Two multinational groups who manufactured counterfeit software products in China and distributed them to countries including United States, Australia, United Kingdom and Canada were smashed in the joint action by the FBI and Ministry of Public Security.

One of the two gangs had been arrested by Shenzhen and Dongguan public security bureaus in Shenzhen, he said.

Editor: Yan