Indulging piracy resembles taking drugs, a Chinese law expert said in Beijing Wednesday, addressing some local governments' obsession with short-term profits earned through piracy.

"In order to pursue economic development and enterprise growth, some local governments have turned a blind eye to the existing piracy, or even helped to cover it," said Zhang Yuqing, a law expert with China's World Trade Organization negotiation delegation, at Sino-U.S. business forum.

"This is not only breaking the law, but resembles drug addiction," he said.

The lack of intellectual property rights has become an increasingly serious issue as China's economy grows stronger. Statistics with the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPC) show that only 2,000-plus Chinese enterprises, or every three out of 10,000 enterprises, have proprietary IPRs.

Only 0.03 percent of Chinese enterprises own key technologies with intellectual property. 99 percent of enterprises have never applied for patents and 60 percent do not have their own trademarks. Though China ranks third in foreign trade in the world, patented high technologies contribute only two percent of the total foreign trade volume, SIPC figures show.

Exporting commodities without identities can only bring in short-term money, disregarding the production of those cheap commodities, causing resource-hunger, energy-consumption and environmental pollution in China. Additionally, it could easily breed trade frictions, said Tian Puli, director general of SIPC, at an online chat with Internet users Wednesday.

"We need to encourage more Chinese enterprises, especially key state businesses, to sharpen their competitiveness through intellectual property," he said.

China has devoted much energy to its IPR protection campaign in recent years. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) reported earlier this month that Chinese applications in 2005 rose 31 percent to 1,334, contributing a larger portion of the world's total than in previous years.

It is a sign that the Chinese industry is increasingly exporting goods with an identity, WIPO assistant director general Ernesto Rubio said.

China dealt with 2,991 intellectual property infringements in 2005, involving 2.06 billion yuan (251 million US dollars), according to the Ministry of Public Security.

Source: Xinhua