After a year-long crackdown on commercial piracy, the nation has successfully had its name removed from the IFPI's watch list of 10 countries with high piracy rates, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) said yesterday.
The IPO quoted this year's IFPI business piracy report as saying that Taiwan was no longer among the 31 countries that the IFPI found to have larger domestic sales of pirated music CDs than of genuine copies last year.
The IFPI represents the recording industry worldwide with over 1,450 members in 75 countries and affiliated industry associations in 48 countries.
One-third of the music CDs sold in markets around the world last year were pirated copies, representing 1.2 billion copies at a total value of US$4.6 billion -- a figure which does not include illegal downloading from the Internet, according to the IFPI report.
Besides Taiwan, Canada and South Korea were also taken off the list due to their improved piracy situation.
Meanwhile, in the latest assessment by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a coalition of associations representing US copyright-based industries, the nation saw losses of some US$320.4 million in the recording business due to piracy over the past year, for a drop of 31 percent from the previous year's figure.
The IIPA also assessed that the nation's movie piracy rate decreased from the 44 percent registered in 2003 to 40 percent last year, while the music piracy rate dropped from 42 percent to 36 percent, according to the IPO.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,