China's software piracy rate dropped eight percent last year, amid rising sales of foreign and domestic software firms, the State Copyright Bureau has announced.

Figures from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) show pirated products accounted for 24 percent of China's software market last year, down two percentage points from 2005.

The proportion of pirated PC software last year was 53 percent, down by four percentage points from 2005, said the report by CNNIC.

"China is striving to crack down on piracy with governments at all levels leading the way in the use of legal software," said Xu Chao, deputy director general of the State Copyright Bureau Copyright Department, on Thursday.

Software piracy in China covers the pirating of discs, pre-installing pirated software, copying between users and illegal usage, according to a survey by the Ministry of Information Industry and the China Software Industry Association.

Copying between users was gradually replacing pirated discs as the main method of piracy, said the survey which covered hundreds of software companies and thousands of software users.

The government had to promote legal software to stamp out piracy and reducing prices was not necessarily effective, said the bureau.

China's software industry reported 2006 sales of 480 billion yuan (60 US dollars), of which software products accounted for about 274 billion yuan, said the report.

"The issue of intellectual property rights is very complex in China," said lawyer Yang Jun. "It will take a long time to educate ordinary people, many of whom consider selling and buying pirated disks a moral issue rather than an illegal action."

Since 1996, law enforcement agencies have stopped 231 illegal disc production lines that could have produced 220 million discs, said the Ministry of Public Security.

From 1994 to 2005, China confiscated 1.5 billion illegal publications, of which more than one billion were pirated discs, according to the Ministry of Culture.

(Xinhua)