Survey on the Public’s Intellectual Property Awareness Released

May 20, 2009

April 22, the first “Survey on the Public’s Intellectual Property Awareness” was released. This survey was sponsored by the State Intellectual Property Office of China and conducted by IP News Center and Tsinghua University Media Survey Laboratory. According to the survey, the public’s general intellectual property awareness in China is lower. People in Guangdong and Beijing headed the list.

This survey lasted 4 months and was spread to 31 provinces, cities and autonomous regions, except Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao. 15,373 effective questionnaires were retrieved and the credibility rate reached 98.6%. According to this survey, the public’s general intellectual property awareness index in China is 42.1 which is a middle to lower position. Differences exist in different regions. Guangdong and Beijing headed the list; their indexes are 51.0 and 49.6.

According to this survey, among the public’s answers to intellectual property knowledge including patent, copyright, trademark right, trade secret, new varieties of plants, integrated circuits layout-design, geographical appellation, unfair competition, scientific discovery right and design patent, only 0.8% has the right answers. In all of these intellectual property categories, patent awareness reached the highest rate at 85.9%, followed by copyright at 75.7% and trademark at 70.0%; geographical appellation and unfair competition has the lowest awareness rate at 9.3% and 9.0%. 48.2% of people have the awareness that intellectual property is a kind of property right; 35.2% of netizens have proper awareness on using other’s copyrighted works on internet; piracy is thoroughly opposed by 61.4% of the people.