This is Guangzhou, southern China's biggest city, mild and green in the middle of December. At the annual Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival, it became the sixth National Model City in Copyright Work, a title awarded by the National Copyright Administration.

Copyright, like the patent and the trademark, is a form of intellectual property. It's invisible, but vital to the development of the cultural industry. This publishing house in Guangzhou has succeeded in selling thirty manga-book copyrights to European countries.

However, in the information age, copyright is not limited to traditional print.... it's gone digital. For this company specializing in geographic data. Copyright has helped make it a big provider of digital spatial and topographical data.

Protecting copyright is now key to China's economic future, as it attempts to make its increasingly costly exports more high-tech and more creative, with the aim of becoming an innovation-led nation by 2020.