China nabs over 14,000 suspects in IPR protection campaign
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Chinese police seized 14,185 suspects in the past five months in an ongoing campaign to halt the production and sale of counterfeit goods, including pirated software, fake drugs and homemade suitcases bearing the names of global luxury brands.
These suspects were allegedly involved in more than 8,000 cases of intellectual property rights (IPR) violations that wrapped up from the time the campaign started in November last year to the end of March, according to figures revealed Tuesday by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) at a news conference.
During the period, more than 7,000 production and sales outlets were destroyed, said Gao Feng, deputy director of the ministry's Economic Crime Investigation Department, adding that the ministry will focus on the supervision of 340 major cases to ensure thorough investigation and punishment of violators.
One "especially major" case, as related by the ministry on Tuesday, dated back to 2008. It involved two Shanghai-based production sites distributing more than 1,500 types of pirated operating system software, including Windows XP and Windows 7.
After a three-month investigation, the two sites were destroyed in March, cutting off supplies for more than 1,000 websites in hundreds of cities offering the download services of pirated software, according to the ministry.
In another case, nine suspects were seized in December last year by police in eastern Jiangsu Province for online sales of fake suitcases and bags featuring "Armani," "Versace," "Prada" and other international luxury brand labels.
Since September 2009, these suspects had allegedly been offering forged goods at ten to 20 percent of the genuine products' original prices on Taobao.com, China's leading business-to-consumer (B2C) website.
While encouraging the public and IPR owners to report leads on instances of misbehavior, Gao said the ministry will "push the campaign further both in scope and depth" until the end of this year.
The campaign was supposed to end in March according to initial plans.
