China, U.S. and other countries vow to crack down on IP crimes

At the 2007 China Forum on Criminal IP Protection concluded on July 25, China, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and organizations such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and the International Criminal Police Organization, adopted the Shenzhen Declaration, aiming at strengthening the exchanges and cooperation on international law enforcement for IP protection and intensifying international cooperation to jointly crack down on IP crimes.

According to the Declaration, IP crimes seriously violate the legal rights and interests of the IP owners, destroy the economic competition orders, deteriorate social moral of honesty and faithfulness, threaten consumers' life security and health, and block the scientific and technological progress, cultural dissemination and the healthy development of international trade, becoming a major problem harming the national, economic and social development. It is law-enforcement organizations' bounden duty to severely combat IP crimes.

Shenzhen Declaration calls for judicial and law-enforcement departments and related governmental departments, enterprises of various countries to jointly promote criminal IP protection under the principle of coping with challenges through strengthening cooperation and maintaining development through intensifying IP protection. Regarding law enforcement, measures should be taken to analyze the features of the industrialized IP crimes, precisely crack down on the whole network of international IP crimes at every link including production, storage, transportation, import and export, so as to establish the international cooperative structure of jointly fighting against international IP crimes.

In terms of the establishment of the mechanism of police-enterprise cooperation, Shenzhen Declaration proposes to establish a mechanism focusing on some key Chinese and foreign enterprises, so that they can supply early warning information to each other and have effective channels for communication and coordination between law enforcement departments and enterprises. The Declaration also encourages and promotes the exchanges and cooperation between foreign-funded enterprises and domestic enterprises to establish the unblocked channels and stable platform for law enforcement departments to better serve the enterprises.