Officials in Jingdezhen, the home of China's best porcelain, are making more efforts to protect the ancient cultural heritage.

A ceramic design copyright trading portal, the first of its kind in the country, went online as the latest initiative to fight against counterfeits and regulate the market in "the city of porcelain" in Jiangxi province, China Intellectual Property News reported.

Lai Zhengbing, director of the province's copyright protection center, said the portal would help Jingdezhen ceramics "go abroad", develop in the international market and form sustainable and healthy creation, protection and trade.

"Online trading in ceramic designs is a new trend and a beneficial attempt. It's worth recommending to more sectors," Lai told Xinhua News Agency. Mainly developed by Jingezhen Ceramic Institute, the online market has strict control over trading products to prevent piracy.

Guo Li, the institute's senior administrative officer for research cooperation, told China Intellectual Property News that the portal required designers to provide product copyright registration certificates. Only those that pass the verification test can continue the copyright transfer or licensing.

He said the portal received several hundred trading applications and products covered categories including daily use, construction, art appreciation and sanitary use.

In future, the online market will include more ceramic companies and build itself into China's largest trading portal in the field, covering all markets across the country, Guo added.

However, he said currently the portal has many challenges to overcome. Guo said because of the portal's requirement for copyright certificates, the provincial copyright bureau set up a service outlet in the institute to help ceramic designers. But many designers are still reluctant to register their works as they worry by going public with their designs they will be more vulnerable to people copying them.

The lack of authorities to determine the authenticity of ceramics is another barrier for online trading.

"It causes problems when it is hard to distinguish the genuine product if someone counterfeits another's works by making slight changes," Guo said.

These problems also exist in the entire Chinese ceramic market, he said. "Ceramics is a knowledge-intensive industry, where the design cost accounts for about one-fifth of the total. Product innovation is crucial to the increase of market share and profits," Guo noted.

Liu Jingfang, a senior artist, told the newspaper that piracy was rampant in the local ceramic market.

"Many original works suffer from infringement after they are registered or published. The high cost and time-consuming procedures always prevent copyright owners from safeguarding their rights, which has greatly dampened their initiative," she said.

Her words were echoed by the spokesman of the Jingdezhen outlet of Taiwan-based luxury porcelain maker Franz Collection Inc, who said weak enforcement of design copyright was a bottleneck that hindered industrial development.

Guo said the institute was working on the construction of an expert database for porcelain authenticity identification.

He also proposed to establish a nationwide credit system for ceramic practitioners to purify the market.

(Source: China Daily)