BEIJING, March 27 (Xinhua) -- Chinese customs have cracked a growing number of counterfeiting cases, an increase of 30 percent annually since China's entry into the WTO in 2001,officials said here Monday.

    About 1,210 piracy cases, involving 99.78 million yuan (12.3 million U.S. dollars) were cracked in 2005, said Gong Zheng, deputy director of China's General Administration of Customs.

    Speaking at a press conference on anti-piracy held by the Information Office of the State Council, Gong said among the 1,210 cases cracked last year, 91.4 percent were related to trademark piracy of clothes, shoes, hats, toys, and plastic goods.

    International brands including Nike, Adidas, Nokia, Philips, as well as a number of domestic big brands, were among the most commonly counterfeited, according to Gong.

    Gong said the customs have also confiscated 210 million pirated discs shipped in from foreign countries since 1999.

    Meanwhile, the police have arrested 2,119 suspects for intellectual property rights (IPR) violations in 2005, an increase of 56 percent from a year before.

    Zheng Shaodong, assistant minister of the Ministry of Public Security, said the money involved in last year's IPR cases topped 1,28 billion yuan, surging 366 percent from the previous year.

    The Chinese government has also taken measures to guarantee the use of authentic software in government departments.

    "By the end of 2005, government departments have all used authorized softwares,"  said Yan Xiaohong, deputy commissioner of the China National Copyright Administration.

    In China, software mainly falls into three categories: system software, enterprise software and software for personal computers (PC). "The first two specially designed for large organizations or enterprises are called uncommon software and almost have no possibility of piracy," Yan said.

    The pirated software do exist but mainly in the software for personal computers, which is called common software," Yan said.

    "Some foreigner organizations said over 90 percent software used in China are pirated, but from the above analysis we can see this is not true in reality since the common software only accounts for one-third of China's software industry," Yan said.

    "To curb the use of pirated common software, we have urged the computer producers to load authorized software before they are sold on the Chinese market," Yan said.

    Yan also revealed the Lenovo, one of the largest PC producer of China who acquired IBM's PC business last year, has begun load the authentic software on the PC before sell them on the Chinese market.

    China, the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world now, produces 80 million PCs annually, with 18-plus million sold on Chinese market and the rest sold overseas. Enditem