Yahoo News tells us about an innovative use in the far east for the common woodchipper. It seem that while we slept, authorities across China have reduced more than 42 million smuggled and pirated discs to slivers on Tuesday, part of a continuing anti-counterfeiting effort aimed at silencing critics overseas. Having the reputation as a hotbed of intellectual property theft, combined with the recent admission into the World Trade Organization, have sent Chinese officials on a cleansing crusade spewing the shards of plastic from the chippers into parking lots and the streets. An ongoing process that has been occuring every few months, Tuesdays demonstration was said to be the largest ever public destruction of CDs, DVDs and other videodiscs. Customs agent Mr. Gui speaks:
"We have attached great importance to protecting intellectual property rights," Gui said.
CCTV ran footage of noisy wood-chippers '” what the official Xinhua News Agency called "pulverizers" '” swallowing discs by the hundreds and spewing the remains of movies and music onto sidewalks and parking lots.
More than 600 people, including consular officials from the United States and Australia, were invited to a ceremony in southern Guangdong province's Shanwei city, where 26 million illegal discs were shattered, Xinhua said.
It said 1.2 million illegal "audio and visual products" were destroyed in Beijing, the capital.
More than 95 percent of the discs were smuggled into the country, while underground manufacturers contributed the rest, according to Ma Zhengjie, an official in charge of the capital's campaign against pornography and illegal publications. |
Western businesses lose an estimated billion in sales to counterfeiting from China each year, trade groups say. American manufacturers nearly imposed trade sanctions against China in the 1990s.
More than 140 illegal disc-production operations have been raided by Chinese authorities, Xinhua said Tuesday.
Source: yahoo.com
