Recently, Guangdong Provincial Intellectual Property Office commissioned a professional research firm to conduct a survey of the awareness of intellectual property rights of local citizens.

The survey shows that more than 70% of respondents know at least one type of intellectual property, indicating that the IP awareness has been greatly increased compared to the first survey results in 2007.

However, in terms of the depth of knowledge in the area, there is still a long way to go.

The survey was conducted by telephone among residents living in Guangzhou and Shenzhen for over a year aging from 18 to 60. 13,492 people were contacted and 809 of them were successfully interviewed (402 in Guangzhou and 409 in Shenzhen). Thus, the overall sample size of the survey is 809, and 95% of the responses could be used with an error rate of about 3.4%.

Findings of the survey reveal that the majority of residents have a strong judgment of intellectual property violations while only 0.2% can not make appropriate judgments. 

In terms of purchases of infringing goods, nearly 1/3 of the respondents said that they have never bought them, while among those who has ever bought infringing goods, the majority said that the behavior only happen occasionally or rarely. Only 1.5% of the respondents often bought such kind of goods and 6.1% only did that sometimes, decreasing from 4.8% and 12.2% respectively in 2007.

More than half of the respondents are against pirated and fake products, considering them as illegal products, and another 30% of the respondents are shamed to use counterfeit products. In addition, 60% of the respondents said that the current genuine goods are too expensive to afford, which is the key reason for people to choose pirated substitutes. And 40% of the respondents indicated that they only pay attention to low-priced but high-quality products regardless if they are genuine or fake. It is worth mentioning that only 18.9% of consumers keep buying pirated audio-video discs, down from 48.3% in 2007.

The survey attests that citizens in Guangdong province are capable of recognizing infringing activities, for instance, 89.6% of the respondents consider behaviors of downloading and publishing online materials as IP violations, but they know little about individual infringing behaviors, for example, only 48.1% of the respondents believe that downloading decoding software from the Internet also breach intellectual property laws. Compared with the survey results in 2007, the citizens have increased awareness on various infringements, but they also said that they still have difficulties in determining online infringements due to a lack of judgment standard.

Nevertheless, the citizens still think that IP violations are rampant and they hope relevant departments could further step up IP protection by enhancing IP dissemination and education as well as tightening enforcement and supervision.

（Source:IPR in China）