China net cafe culture crackdown

Chinese authorities closed 12,575 net cafes in the closing months of 2004, the country’s government said.

According to the official news agency most of the net cafes were closed down because they were operating illegally.

Chinese net cafes operate under a set of strict guidelines and many of those most recently closed broke rules that limit how close they can be to schools.

The move is the latest in a series of steps the Chinese government has taken to crack down on what it considers to be immoral net use.

I’ve always wondered where those claims that the copyright industry accounts for x.xx% of the US GDP. Well, it turns out that the IIPA has been assembling these statistics for a while now, and their reports are online. The 2004 report is available here: Copyright Industries in the US Economy. It’s interesting to see which industries are the core copyright businesses: it’s the software sector that gets the numbers up there. For example, here’s some of the reported data for estimated revenues generated by foreign sales/exports of selected copyright industries (billion$)

Industry	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002
Recorded records/tapes	$10.01	$9.90	$10.27	$9.76	$8.91	$8.47
Motion pictures, TV, video	$12.34	$12.93	$13.70	$14.50	$14.69	$17.00
Computer software	$40.28	$41.87	$50.65	$56.88	$60.74	$59.97
Newspapers, books, periodicals	$4.22	$4.12	$4.15	$4.21	$3.93	$3.82