Student wins China piracy competition

Nation-wide contest created to raise awareness

By CLIFFORD COONAN

BEIJING -- Liang Jinwei, a 20-year-old broadcasting student at Guangxi U. has won an antipiracy short video competish organized by the Motion Picture Assn. and the Beijing Student Film Festival.

The China-wide contest on the theme "Respect Copyrights, Stay Away From Piracy" was open to students at more than 300 universities. It aimed to raise awareness of intellectual property issues.

At a time when politicians are squaring off over this issue at the World Trade Organization, the competish is a sign that Chinese and American firms are still able to cooperate on the ground.

Liang's one-minute video shows students responding to a teacher's questions about the meaning of the word "steal," and his winning production earned him a trip to Hollywood to visit MPA member company film studios.

The pics were judged by helmer Feng Xiaogang, China Film Copyright Protection Assn. chairman Zhu Yongde and Zhang Pimin, deputy director general of the Film Bureau of China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (Sarft).

"The awareness of the importance of intellectual property rights that has been shown by the entrants to this competition is reassuring, and the MPA and our member companies are pleased to have these talented young filmmakers as allies in the fight against movie piracy," said Mike Ellis, senior vice prexy and regional director for Asia-Pacific for the MPA.

He said it was vital that young people in China, where piracy rates for movies is estimated at 93%, learn how piracy hits the companies that make movies, both at home and abroad.

"It costs people jobs. Very simply, if movie pirates cannot find buyers for their goods, movie piracy will die," Ellis said.

MPA studios lost an estimated $6.1 billion to worldwide piracy in 2005, about $2.4 billion from bootlegging, $1.4 billion to illegal copying and $2.3 billion to Internet piracy.