China Takes Aim At Software Pirates With New Copyright Laws

[mandy]

This week, the Chinese government announced a new law to prevent pirated material from being passed around online. Anyone caught uploading copyrighted material to the Internet without the owner's permission will be subject to penalties including fines and confiscation of property. The new statute also lifts a concept from the US' own Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and "prohibits the intentional evasion or breach of technical measures to prevent copyright violations." Production, import, and distribution of circumvention devices has been made illegal as well.

The issue of intellectual property protection in China is an important one on a number of levels. The US trade deficit with that nation amounted to over US$201 billion in 2005, and although there are myriad reasons for that, encouraging the purchase of legitimate software and media is at least one small step toward evening things out...

full article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060530-6944.html