MICKEY Kantor and Mickey Mouse are two Americans with different strategies for combatting copyright piracy in China.
Mickey Kantor, the United States Trade Representative, yesterday renewed his call for a crackdown on 29 mainland factories known for making pirated compact discs (CDs).
He said China must destroy pirated products, stop their export and ensure factories were producing legitimate products.
Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse, the symbol of Walt Disney, was pricing its cassettes and CDs in China low enough to be competitive with pirated copies, assuring the company record sales of a major movie soundtrack.
Disney claims that The Lion King soundtrack has become the best-selling Western music album on record in China, selling more than a million legitimate copies in four months.
'No one can speak for the number of pirated copies out there,' Tim Whale, Disney's vice-president of music and publishing for the Asia Pacific region, said.