China once again has been accused of being weak in protecting intellectual property rights. This time, the accusation, along with others, cost China recognition of its coveted status as a market economy by the European Union.

Being a market economy does help foster awareness of the need for intellectual property rights protection, if not actually compelling it. And it is also true that the awareness and degree of protection of intellectual property rights is proof of a country's status as a market economy and the way its people do business every day.

The reason is this: a market economy features and emphasizes free transactions and there can be no free transactions if every time traders take their goods to market, they are robbed or the goods are stolen, or that the traders suddenly find that the market no longer needs their goods because everyone already has them.

Not only does the notion of intellectual property rights seem alien to the Chinese mentality and its social system, but also people seem to wish to see it trodden underfoot. These "rights" hinder me from downloading free MP3s from websites, prevent me from "borrowing" pages from others' dissertations and force me to buy authorized software for my office's computers.

China's Music Copyright Association has been fighting a protracted war to force hotels, clubs, restaurants and even trains to pay royalties to the composers of the music they play for business purposes and the war cannot be said to have been completely successful. The "debt collection" battle started nearly three years ago in Beijing and has moved to a second city - Shanghai - only recently, with a limited number of leading hotels agreeing to "pay for the 'free' lunch" they have been enjoying.

Since China's WTO accession, huge efforts have been made to strengthen the country's protection of intellectual property rights. The number of laws and regulations to protect copyright is up and the number of factories dishing out pirated disks is down. But still, the accusation of being weak on copyright protection lingers.

See what most of today's college students are doing and you will find some indication that the accusation is not totally unjustified.

Today's college students no longer like the idea of buying or borrowing a book. They photocopy them. The cost of photocopying a book is substantially lower than having to buy one.

Friends studying in Sweden tell me that in university libraries there, even if you just photocopy a few pages from a book (let alone a whole book), the librarian will check to ensure that what you have done has not infringed author's copyright.

But in China at our universities, students are photocopying like crazy. Unfortunately it is precisely in the ranks of these student elites that China will find its future customs officials, judges, software designers, authors and composers.

The whole problem has something to do with the national mentality, a common sense of what is right and what is wrong, what constitutes the boundary of rights and what constitutes their infringement.

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