More effort is needed to raise awareness of intellectual property rights protection across the country, senior government officials said yesterday.

"I witnessed the establishment of IPR laws in China," said Xu Jialu, vice chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee. "It took us only 20 years to achieve what other countries did in a century, but the change in people's ideas and perceptions is much slower."

During the just-concluded 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, at which President Hu Jintao promised the implementation of a new "national strategy" on IPR protection in the near future, China's IPR chief Tian Lipu reiterated that China needed a long time to get people to understand the importance of IPR.

"There is this couple near my home," Tian said. "The husband earns 50 cents (US$0.07) profit for selling a watermelon and his wife earns the same for selling a pirated DVD. In their minds, the two things are the same - they don't know that a DVD is a product with IPR and that right should be honored."

Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of the National Copyright Administration, said that most often people will make judgments based on immediate gains and benefits.

Yan said more effort is required to help make them regard IPR as a priority.

The government has staged a consistent fight against piracy, destroying pirated books and DVDs in public, trading counterfeit DVDs for movie tickets and raiding factories churning out fakes. But piracy is still rampant.

Dr Prabuddha Ganguli, a consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organization, said vigorous law enforcement is essential to IPR protection.

(Xinhua News Agency October 24, 2007)