This latest report is sure to anger the MPAA and American movie distributors especially because the movie reportedly cost $500 million dollars to make.
Earlier this month, the US filed complaints against China with the WTO claiming the China was not doing enough to punish movie pirates and that their restrictions on media imports were violating trade rules. China criticized the move and the Vice Premier, Wu Yi, threatened that the complaints would "badly damage" cooperation, and emphasized that China was doing alot to enforce copyright protections.
"The United States Trade Representative, the USTR, has totally ignored the massive strides China has made," Wu told an intellectual property forum in Beijing.
China did however say that they would formulate an anti-piracy action plan and that they had arrested 998 people last year for copyright infringement.
"Over the last few years, the amount of manpower and work that China has put into protecting intellectual property rights and the results that have been achieved, have been unprecedented," Wu said.
"Every year we have nationwide events to protect intellectual property and we have always kept up the pressure on the pirates. The effects of this clean-up get better every year."
Sony however, has so far claimed that the DVDs are a hoax and are really just copies of Spider-man 2. In a statement Sony reported that "Contrary to news reports about stolen copies of 'Spider-Man 3' being sold illegally on the streets in China, our investigation in China has revealed no case of the film being pirated to date...After an initial investigation of online sites worldwide, we have so far found no pirated copies of 'Spider-Man 3' on the Internet."
Sony also added that so far investigators in China have failed to find anything other than Spider-man 2 DVDs in Spider-man 3 boxes.
Source:
Zeropaid
Reuters
Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 24 Apr 2007 20:37
