"There is some improvement, and some enforcement acts have been taken, but by and large the number of pirated product on the street hasn't dissipated at all," Glickman said in a phone interview from Hong Kong, where he was meeting with senior government officials. "It's just this constant challenge for us."
Representatives of the Chinese agencies that oversee the film industry declined interview requests.
The Bush administration this year has lodged two complaints against China with the World Trade Organization, accusing the Asian nation of failing to uphold international law by inadequately protecting copyrighted movies, music and software. The office of the U.S. trade representative alleged that import restrictions and lax law enforcement, including high thresholds for prosecution, have allowed counterfeiting to flourish in China. The case is pending.
In public statements through the New China News Agency, officials say they have made significant progress on intellectual property rights issues.
The Supreme People's Court said courts at all levels last year heard 769 criminal intellectual property rights cases, a 52% increase from 2005, and sentenced 1,212 people, a 62% jump.
In one-high profile copyright crackdown last year, the government seized 58 million pirated CDs, DVDs, computer programs and books. A big-time CD maker and smuggler in southern China was sentenced to life in prison.
The increased enforcement is obvious to film expert Yin Hong, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Until recently, he said, most DVD stores sold pirated discs almost exclusively, but now many in Beijing and Shanghai sell only licensed discs.
"This is much better than in the past," Yin said. "But China is such a big country with such a huge population that things are very complicated and hard to manage."
The entrenched political, economic and cultural issues make the prospects of a legitimate Chinese marketplace for DVDs highly unlikely.
Some DVD replicating facilities licensed by the government are culprits in piracy, according to one report that examined the effect of movie counterfeiting on China's economy. The 2006 study -- by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Center for American Economic Studies and its Institute of World Economics and Politics -- found that the 774 registered production facilities had the capacity to make far more discs than are licensed.
