Qingdao was entitled the National Copyright Protection Model City by the State Intellectual Property Office of the People's Republic of China on Sept 9, the second of its kind in the country.

Last year, the Qingdao municipal government invested 90 million yuan ($14.09 million) to purchase legal software for government departments at municipal and district levels, which raised public awareness on copyright protection.

The Qingdao municipal government has made remarkable progress since it allocated 100 million yuan ($15.65 million) for copyright protection in 2008. It has built a copyright protection mechanism that improves copyright management systems.

"We need to build more copyright protection model cities to improve our competitiveness and capacity for independent industrial innovations. Over recent years, many model cities, like Chengdu, Qingdao and Shanghai, have made great contributions to build a favorable social environment for copyright protection," said Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of the State Intellectual Property Office of PRC.

Wang Xiulin, vice mayor of the Qingdao municipal government, said, "Copyright protection plays an important strategic role in building an innovation-oriented city. To change the current economic growth pattern, we need to rely on IPR management and protection and improve our independent innovation capacity."

"We obtained some achievements popularizing legal software among companies in the last two years and we will continue adopting more policies on IPR protection issues," he added.

Since the nation-wide campaign against infringement on IPR was launched by the State Council last year, the gross output value of the innovation industry in Qingdao amounted to 43.63 billion yuan ($6.83 billion), accounting for 7.7 percent of its GDP. There are more than 12,000 companies related to innovation registered in Qingdao. Qingdao Commercial Bank promises to lend no less than 10 billion yuan ($1.57 billion) to innovation industries in the coming three years. The central government encourages other cities to learn from Qingdao's experience.

By Xie Chuanjiao and Wu Binbin (China Daily Qingdao Bureau)

Edited by Chen Zhilin and Tania Lee