China and the United States have conducted effective cooperation in copyright protection since a mechanism was set up for the purpose last month, a Chinese culture official said in Nanjing Tuesday.

Liu Yuzhu, head of the culture market department of the Ministry of Culture, made the remark at the first joint meeting of the Sino-US film copyright protection mechanism, held in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province.

China's Ministry of Culture (MOC) and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) inked a memorandum with the United States' Motion Picture Association (MPA) in mid-July following the bilateral consensus on protecting intellectual property rights reached early last month.

According to the memo, the MOC, SARFT and the MPA will hold joint meetings on a regular basis. The two sides will exchange publications and release information on films and home video products, work out schemes to jointly crack down on pirated home video products and protect film copyrights.

In the first half of this year, the cultural authorities of China investigated 349,000 audio-visual studios and stores, confiscating 94.21 million pirated discs and tapes, Liu revealed.

"The Chinese government is determined to and capable of protecting intellectual property rights and the rights of all foreign copyright owners wil be guaranteed in China," he said.

"All activities infringing upon copyrights will be dealt with harshly according to law."

Michael C. Ellis, Senior Vice President and Regional Director of the MPA, expressed the hope that the two sides would further enhance bilateral cooperation to protect the rights of film makers and distributors.

Source: Xinhua