A successful Olympic Games needs everyone involved and even ordinary fans can do their part by boycotting fake Olympic merchandise.

In November 2005, the Chinese Olympic mascots, the five Fuwa, were announced and since then "fake Fuwa" have flourished throughout the nation. The Internet is rife with reports on the production, distribution and sale of phony Fuwa.

What will Olympic visitors think if they see countless peddlers hawking fake Olympic mascots in subway stations, at night markets or on overpasses?

The Olympic Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection campaign is not just for the Olympic organizers, partners or other Olympic-affiliated companies. The campaign is also a good platform to demonstrate the integrity and unity of Chinese citizens.

The government has various measures to crack down on violators with a series of regulations.

According to the regulations, once goods are identified as fake, they can be immediately confiscated and destroyed. Fines can be as much as five times the estimated illegal income from the pirated goods and up to 50,000 yuan without any known income.

Near the end of 2006, a man surnamed Fu was the first person arrested for selling pirated 2008 Olympic Games merchandise. He was detained with a large quantity of counterfeit mascots and commemorative coins at a market in Beijing's Haidian District.

It's generally not too difficult to tell the authentic Fuwa from the fake ones. Every official Fuwa has a security tag on the logo and all are only sold in authorized shopping malls and on official websites (www.2008eshop.cn and www.bj2008eshop.com), not in outdoor markets and subway exits.

The fake Games products are often made with shoddy materials with no labels or authentication certificates and some of the phony Fuwa are filled with industrial waste such as black moldy cotton, which can threaten people's health, especially children and the elderly. Even so, some people still knowingly buy fake Olympic souvenirs with the excuse that the prices of the real deals are too high.

But to appeal to all budgets, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the 2008 Olympiad (BOCOG) developed 300 Fuwa-related products, including stationery, toys, clothing, accessories, precious metal medals and badges, with the prices ranging from eight yuan to tens of thousands yuan. So both children and the high-end collectors can find authentic products they can afford.

And buying authorized Olympic products is also a good way to contribute to the construction of the Beijing Games, as portions of the sales revenue are used to help finance the event's infrastructure.

According to Beijing's Olympic budget report and the China's 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-05), the total investment on the Olympic Games will reach 280 billion yuan, which will be mainly invested in infrastructure related to traffic, the environment and public information.

"Based on the experience of previous Olympic Games, the income from Olympic mascots usually accounts for 10 percent of the total Olympic revenue. As China has a large population, the mascots' revenue could account for an even larger proportion, say 15 percent or more," says Huang Wei, the senior consultant with Beijing Development and Reform Commission.

The IPR battles are likely to become fiercer as the clock winds down to August 8. So, to help win the anti-piracy battle say "no" to the peddlers and dial the IPR hotline at 12315 to report trademark infringement cases.

(China Daily 03/17/2008 page9)