Experts Brainstorm on Digital Rights Protection in Beijing（在线收听）

More than 100 business people, government officials, industry experts and academics from China and the UK gathered in Beijing to probe ways to better protect digital property rights and stem online piracy.

CRI's Wujia reports.

 
Protecting digital rights has become a serious issue now that there is a new generation of consumers who have been brought up downloading information from the internet and have no knowledge of the past era where people went to record shops to buy audio recordings.

Industry experts from China and the United Kingdom discussed and debated the topic of digital rights at the fourth UK-China Internet Roundtable today in Beijing.
 
For some, the stance of the government, as expressed through legislation, has been pivotal in.

Justin Bass is the manager of Britain's leading 3G service provider "3".

"One of the things we have been doing is working with the government on a piece of legislation it has enacted called the Digital Economy Act. It's been quite slow in implementing this legislation because of arguments as to whether the legislation itself was legal. But the government's stance is this: Whatever internet service provider you are, mobile or fixed line, we want to reduce unlawful file sharing in the U.K. We want to encourage the creative industries, and we support that."

Technology has always been at the core of the internet age.

Some content providers are trying to gain the upper hand in fighting piracy by accessing leading technologies.

Pierre Cheung is BBC Worldwide's China manager.

"We work closely with our partners. Every time we have a work relationship with our partners, we will have a questionnaire about their backbone delivery system and what sort of digital rights management software they are using. Then we need to engage our clients about how they show the videos, how they protect the videos. Fortunately, a lot of video portals these days have very sophisticated ways of protecting intellectual property rights. They can do geo-targeting; they can limit the video to only being seen in China, or vice versa. We 100-percent rely on the partners."

Cheung says the once rampant phenomenon of digital rights infringement in China has fundamentally come under control during the past three years.

Wang Chen is Director of the State Internet Information Office, a department set up in May and tasked with investigating and punishing websites that violate laws and regulations.

"The Chinese government regards protecting intellectual property on the internet as an important means to ensure the healthy development of the internet. It attaches great importance to cooperating with its British counterpart in protecting digital intellectual property rights. In the past 10 months, the Chinese government fined or ordered the shutdown of more than 150 websites for offering unlawful video clips of the popular English Premier League."

As progress is being made here for digital rights holders, perhaps the biggest achievement this year was Baidu's agreement with music studios in July.

The country's largest internet search engine pledged to distribute only licensed music through its MP3 search service in the future.

For CRI, I am Wujia.