In Hong Kong the authorities are considering prosecuting those who buy counterfeit goods in a battle against widespread copyright piracy. The Secretary for Trade and Industry, Mr Chau Tak Hay, said last week that piracy would continue to be a problem in Hong Kong for some time to come despite intensive government efforts.
"We suspect if we do not see a fall in consumer demand for pirated and counterfeit articles we may have to visit the question of whether the consumer can continue to be given unlimited freedom to create market demand for illegal articles with impunity," he told an intellectual property symposium in Hong Kong.
Earlier, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa told the conference that seizures of pirated video discs in the first five months of this year had exceeded seizures for the whole of 1997. Copyright piracy has exploded in Hong Kong over the past 18 months, with record industry sources claiming compact disc manufacturing capacity has surged to around 400 million discs a year from just 60 million a year ago.