All content on the website of the National Cultural Information Resources Sharing Project has secured proper intellectual property rights (IPRs), setting a good example for government agencies in the use of online material.

The sharing project, initiated by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of culture in April 2002, aims to improve the flow of cultural information between urban areas and the countryside and enrich rural cultural life with the help of modern digital technology.

"First we identify the basic requirements of farmers before compiling and categorizing resources and then we focus our efforts on settling the IPRs involved to ensure problems have been solved," said Vice-minister of Culture Zhou Heping, according to an interview posted on www.gov.cn.

The resources come from libraries, museums, art galleries, art research institutions, TV stations and databases compiled by scientific, agricultural and health departments across the country, preserved in digital form to accelerate the dissemination and innovation of Chinese culture.

The website www.ndcnc.gov.cn offers more than 30 portals, ranging from artistic content such as literature, traditional opera, music, films and concerts to skills and knowledge about agricultural science, healthcare and updated figures on trade markets.

Unlike free downloads from the Internet that offer a glimpse of many subjects, but never the full extent due to copyright issues, the end users of the project get a complete version on a subject, whether it is technology, a movie, or a novel, due to full compliance with IPR owners.

While acquiring the IPRs in line with Chinese laws and regulations, the sponsors also encourage copyright owners to donate their IPRs, making it a landmark charity program in the country to close the cultural divide between urban and rural areas, according to Zhou.

"Quite a number of well-known scholars and scientists have donated their copyrights to the project since its operation began five years ago," Zhou says, adding that the project can also use the copyrights of government-sponsored charity performances free of charge.

The content of the websites will be further enriched in the future and sponsors must fully comply with IPR issues, he notes.

The project has now made more than 3,000 multi-media presentations on agricultural science, including know-how on farming, aquatic breeding and processing, and legal and healthcare knowledge, all popular subjects among farmers.

It also included more than 600 movies, 2,000 songs and traditional operas, tens of thousands of books and offered a range of cultural forums.

The information is disseminated through the Internet, satellite transmission, digital TV broadcasts, portable hard disks and VCDs.

By January 31, 2007, some 6,700 sub-centers and grassroots-level stations had been established in accordance with the management structure of the project, which provide services to at least 100 million people.

The network will cover every county and village in China by the end of 2010, Zhou says, noting that the central fiscal department will allocate another 2.5 billion yuan to fulfill that goal.

East China's Shandong Province was the first in the country to extend the network to cover all its counties and villages, followed by Central China's Hunan Province and Southwest China's Guizhou Province.

Another three provinces, Henan, Shanxi and Zhejiang, will meet the goal by the end of this year, while Beijing and Tianjin are projected achieve it a year later.

Zhang Yanbo, head of the project's national service center, says that the project has been implemented fairly effectively nationwide thanks to the rapid expansion in recent years of Internet and cable TV beyond cities to rural areas.

"For example, such networks cover every community in Shanghai. Through the networks, we can transmit our cultural resources, such as digital books, to every single member of the community to meet their needs," Zhang says.

Similarly, because of a network for radio and TV broadcasts that reaches every village in the country and because the project also has cooperation from digital TV and cable TV networks, over 800,000 residents in eastern cities such as Qingdao and southern cities such as Foshan can see the complete content of the project, he adds.

The Ministry of Culture signed contracts with all provincial-level culture departments in mid-September to stipulate their responsibilities in promoting the information-sharing project.

Their role includes ensuring the construction of the infrastructure networks in towns, counties and villages on time and in good quality, guaranteeing sufficient local fiscal support for the project, establishing technology and networking construction standards and resource collection, supervising and examining use of the central fiscal fund and tightening the management for infrastructure construction.

Zhou says the project is by no means perfect and complaints about the insufficiency of resources can occasionally be heard. Yet he is confident that the situation will improve with the allocation of funds and new infrastructure.

"Our cultural development hasn't been able to fully keep pace with our economic development. The developmental imbalance in different regions also hinders the sharing of cultural information in the country," Zhou says.

"As we keep enriching the resources, the service performance of the project can be further improved," he adds.

(China Daily)