The hottest news in Beijing today is about intellectual property rights: Chinese courts will from now treat IPR infringements as a ‘major criminal offense’ rather than a minor one.
The Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate held a joint press conference Tuesday to announce the judicial interpretation of the Criminal Law application on IPR violations. The new criteria go into effect on December 22.
One of the changes on the interpretation set sentences for CD, VCD, DVD and software piracy. A person who copies literature, music, movies, TV programs and software onto more than 1,000 disks without permission from the copyright owners can be sentenced jail terms of up to three years; more than 5,000 copies can carry a sentence between three and seven.
The pictured front page is from Beijing Daily Messenger, the big headline is “Selling more than 1,000 pirated CDs can be result in criminal sentence”. The photo tells another story: the Beijing Public Security Bureau held a ceremony to return stolen bikes to their owners.
The China Daily’s front page article on the IPR regulations is here.