New progress on China's software legalization

After central and provincial governmental departments in China completed the tasks on software legalization, by this April, 62.15% municipal governments and 32.85% official authorities at county level have also eliminated the use of pirated software, resulting in a total of 3.232 million sets of operating system, office or antivirus software purchased under the overall central and local government procurement programs, valued at 2.165 billion yuan, reported from the first summary meeting on progress of software legitimization this year on May 21.

Last month, as a move of the national interministerial conference on software legalization to check local fulfillment of the obligations, an inspection working group was formulated by officials from eight central authorities including the Ministry of Finance, National Copyright Administration and the State Intellectual Property Office, targeting 16 provinces, municipalities as well as 14 central governmental departments such as the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Education .

The inspection saw welcome improvements on software assets management on the whole, but also a lack of awareness and financial support in several areas, which deserved more attention of the interministerial conference. This national commission has vowed to have all governmental authorities at municipal and county level to finish the due tasks by the end of this year.

The Chinese government has made years of efforts to promote authorized software, which might be traced back to October 2001, when the General Office of the State Council (the Cabinet) promulgated a notice to urge central governmental departments to eliminate the use of pirated software. Similar notices were delivered to authorities at provincial and municipal level in May 2004. The effort devoted in the past three years starting in October 2010 was to reinforce the achievements and further develop a permanent mechanism to root out piracy. [Chinese version is available on SIPO.gov.cn]