China fakes take toll on US movie, publishing, medicine industries

Agence France Presse | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
by P. Parameswaran
February 16, 2007

Waving fake DVDs and pirated books, officials from Hollywood and the American publishing industry have complained to US lawmakers that the rampant counterfeiting problem in China was wreaking havoc to their businesses.

At a Congressional hearing on Beijing's enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights, the US pharmaceutical industry also highlighted losses -- at a "conservative" estimate of 3.4 billion dollars annually -- from the manufacture and sale of fake medicine in China.

"China is the most difficult market in the world for the US motion picture industry," Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, lamented at the hearing in the House of Representatives.

"More than nine of every 10 DVDs in the China market is fake," he said. "Regrettably, to coin a phrase, if you did not see a counterfeit DVD, you were not in China."

The world's film industry lost 2.7 billion dollars in China in 2005, according to research commissioned by the association, whose members themselves took a blow of 244 million dollars that year, said Glickman, a former US cabinet minister.

But he pointed out that even though one could see -- in pirated form -- any US film in China, the legitimate market was one of the world's most restricted.

"The pirates have a thriving market but our companies -- who invest millions and employ hundreds of thousands American workers -- are throttled," he said, citing statistics.

Last year, US firms earned 109 million dollars in box office in China but, in comparison, over the last weekend, the Chinese domestic box office was worth 108 million dollars, Glickman said.

The US motion picture industry, he said, poured millions of dollars in fighting piracy in China but the effort would be worthless unless it "has fair access to a fair China market.

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