I have long railed against public awareness campaigns designed to educate people about intellectual property rights infringement.

My basic problem with such campaigns is that they are all fluff. People will buy fakes and download/buy pirated copyrighted works for one major reason: they can. If there is no real threat of punishment, then the practice will continue. Telling people, over and over, that IP infringement is a bad thing will not stop it.

Most people these days know that the movie they download is not being given to them for free because the movie studio happened to be feeling magnanimous on that day, and so in that sense, the public is already well educated.

So yesterday was World Intellectual Property Day. China Tech News has a good rundown on some of the initiatives here in China. See if you can identify those activities that might actually do some good:

China’s Office of the National Campaign on Anti-prostitution and Anti-delinquency, National Copyright Administration of China and the Society and Law Channel of CCTV have jointly launched an initiative to mark the ninth World Intellectual Property Day, which falls on April 26, 2009.

Millions of Chinese consumers and dozens of mainstream media and portal websites across China will join this initiative which is called Green Tag Signing and aims to guide the public to show respect to creation and innovation and offer support to legal publications, both online and offline.

Consumers who buy books or audio-video products from major book stores across the country will receive a Green Tag starting April 22. Besides, Internet users can join the initiative by participating in an online survey on Sina.com. Meanwhile, a total of 46.85 million illegal publications will be destroyed during the same period.

The Society and Law Channel of CCTV has arranged a special party for the initiative, inviting public figures and representatives from the IPR departments to discuss issues related to the protection of IPR.

See anything good there? Green Tag initiative? How about the online survey? Surely destroying 47 million illegal publications must be a good thing, right?

Meh.

None of those things will lead to stiffer penalties or more aggressive enforcement. All of those publications being destroyed would have been disposed of anyway, just now the cameras are turned on.

Here’s an idea. Let’s take all that money used for World IP Day campaigns and hire a couple new cops, or AIC officials, or Customs officers.

Seems like I’m not the only bitter cynic. Check out Michael Geist’s take on this from the Canadian perspective:

Today is World Intellectual Property Day which means that rather than focusing on creativity or on policies that meet the needs of creators and users, we get a private function for MPs and Senators on Parliament Hill sponsored by Senator Joseph Day, where the RCMP will display counterfeit batteries and unsafe extension cords as part of the continuing attempt to conflate health and safety counterfeit concerns with copyright.  It means we get an op-ed from the U.S. Consul General in Toronto claiming that failure to ratify international treaties (ie. the WIPO Internet treaties) costs jobs and can compromise safety.  And it means we get a major press release from CRIA touting declines in physical CD sales (digital sales were not available) with claims that counterfeiting and P2P are the major reasons behind the declines.