Government measures to clamp down on illegal movie downloads are having very little impact, and infringements of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) remain a thorny issue, People First Party Legislator George Hsieh (
Hsieh yesterday demonstrated how easy it is to download a copy of Ang Lee's (
"Although the film is still on the movie circuit, anyone can easily see it for free by downloading a link from a BitTorrent Web site," said Hsieh, who listed 10 sites hosting links to the movie.
PHOTO: CHU PEI-HSIUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
"We haven't had much progress in combating copyright infringements of music, motion pictures and other works of art on the Internet," Chen Shu-mei (陳淑美), an official of the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Intellectual Property Office, told the press conference yesterday.
Hsieh expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of the government's strategy to combat Internet piracy, saying that the authorities should try to force file-sharing sites to close down, instead of punishing the sites' users.
"While we have trained police officers in the investigation and prosecution of Internet crimes, it is impossible to comprehensively guard against this kind of activity, as there are too many different BitTorrent servers on the Internet," Chen said.
Internet IPR infringement has been listed as one of the main problems hindering Taiwan's removal from the US' "Special 301 Priority Watch List" of copyright violators.
Government Information Office Minister Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦), when questioned on this issue during a separate event at legislature yesterday, said he would report the BitTorrent sites Hsieh had listed to relevant government agencies.
Cheng said the government was aware of the serious IPR problem posed by downloads of movies and music.
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
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