The real thing: Director of Intellectual Property Stephen Selby says the Government will continue to promote the No Fakes Pledge.

About $7 million has been budgetted for public education efforts in the coming financial year to promote intellectual property rights.

Director of Intellectual Property Stephen Selby said this when announcing the result of the Sixth Annual Survey on Public Awareness of Protection of Intellectual Property Rights 2004 today.

"The survey provides us new information and insights on how to tackle intellectual property rights infringements in Hong Kong. We shall keep up our efforts in promoting public awareness and respect for intellectual property rights.

"We have budgeted about $7 million for public education efforts in the coming financial year. For instance, we will further promote the No Fakes Pledge," Mr Selby said.

More promotional effort is also required to educate the public about the importance of respecting intellectual property rights in the cyber world, he said.

Questions about the file-sharing behaviour on the Internet have been added to the 2004 survey.

70% aware of infringement

More than 70% of respondents knew that file-sharing was an infringement of intellectual property rights. Less than 10% were often or sometimes involved in file-sharing activities on the Internet.

The survey revealed younger males with a higher education level tend to visit newsgroups or unauthorised websites to download files for file-sharing.

"The popularity of the Internet has raised new issues concerning intellectual property rights protection," Mr Selby said.

"Although the results of the survey in 2004 reveals that intellectual property rights infringement on the Internet is not as serious as we have expected, we believe that more promotional effort is still required to educate the public, especially young people, about the importance of respecting intellectual property rights in the cyber world."

Public awareness upswing
The survey also showed that public awareness of intellectual property rights has improved as the awareness level of the relevant law has grown from 55.2% in 1999 when the survey first started to 71.2% in 2004.

It found 95.7% of respondents believed it was necessary to protect intellectual property rights in Hong Kong. About three-quarters (76%) of them considered the infringement of intellectual property rights in Hong Kong was serious, a slight increase compared to 74.5% of 2003.

More than 23% of respondents considered that the general public should play a dominant role in improving the situation of intellectual property rights infringement in Hong Kong, which is more than in 2003 (18.7%).

Education best

Respondents also believed that "raising awareness of intellectual property rights protection and strengthening education" (31.5%) was the most effective measure to improve the situation.

Most of the findings are consistent with those in previous years. However, fewer people (17.5% of total respondents) claimed they would often or sometimes buy pirated or counterfeit products, whereas 27.3% claimed they would seldom buy and more than half (55.2%) claimed that they had never bought such products.

Of those who had bought pirated or counterfeit goods before, 63% claimed that they bought pirated music CDs, movie DVDs or VCDs the most, followed by computer software (15.2%) and games (8.1%).

The survey results are available on the Intellectual Property Department website.