Three Chinese students were given awards on Thursday for their creativity in three Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Public Awareness Competitions by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

"Protecting IPR is the responsibility of everyone. Only in this way can we effectively protect our creativity," said Yang Tingting, 21, of the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She won a China-wide short video protection competition on the theme Respect Copyrights, Stay Away from Piracy.

Yang's flash animation I Want to Buy Legitimate features three shop owners who only sell pirated DVDs, forcing the customer to wonder whether he needs to buy pirated goods.

There has been an increasing awareness of IPR protection in China, from the government to citizens, said Clark T. Randt, U.S. Ambassador to China, at the awards ceremony.

The other two award recipients were Liang Jinwei, a junior student from the Guangxi University for Nationalities, whose one-minute video short depicted the responses of young students to a teacher's questions about the meaning of the word "steal," and Xu Huabin, a nine-year-old girl who won an anti-piracy campaign organized by the MPAA and the China Association for Educational Technology.

China's leading user-generated content video-sharing sites are cooperating with the MPAA to fight online piracy, a growing threat to domestic and international copyright owners.

The awards ceremony was part of the seventh Annual Ambassador's Roundtable Discussion on IPR in China, a high-level government and industry forum.

(Xinhua News Agency November 7, 2008)