The wait-and-see approach seems focused on the Chinese government to initiate a national campaign against piracy.

Piracy has become the biggest obstacle to development of the Chinese software industry, but most mainland software companies are waiting for government intervention rather than teaming up to fight the crime, the official mainland media reported on Tuesday. At the on-going Shenzhen Hi-Tech Fair, five mainland software developers made a public appeal to their counterparts to launch an anti-piracy campaign. However, to their disappointment, only five of the expected 50 guests showed up for a meeting, China Economic Times reported on Tuesday.

The mainland's software sales amounted to 16.5 billion yuan in 1999 and are expected to reach 22 billion yuan this year. If the piracy rate rises by 10 percentage points, the software sales will decrease by 3.97 billion yuan, the newspaper said.

As piracy tended to generate huge illegal profits, many software developers have found it difficult to operate, representatives of domestic software enterprises said.

The Shenzhen Hecheng Scientific and Technological Company, a pioneer in software development, sold 20,000 sets of its office management system in 1995 and 100,000 sets in 1997. Thousands of pirated versions were also sold. So many that the firm was forced to withdraw the product from the market. The decision came after the company had spent 10 million yuan on research and development and five million yuan on advertising.

US-based Adobe Company, the inventor of Photoshop and PageMaker, has also been a common target of piracy. Adobe launched a lawsuit against the Shanghai Nianhua Company for copyright infringement in August 1999 and in July won its case.

Sybase Software, which has also suffered major losses due to piracy, was one of the backers of the failed Shenzhen meeting. Company officials said they hoped software makers nationwide would unite to establish an anti-piracy code.

"The final solution lies in the hands of software producers themselves," an official with the Shenzhen Software Association said. Pirated software sells for a fraction of the price of the genuine stuff. "They should lower their prices to squeeze the possible profits of piracy," the official said.

Beijing's Kingsoft Company made an attempt at this, selling its WPS2000 office software for 30 yuan. It sold well.

Another education software firm sold its educational software at a lower price than pirated versions.

But Hecheng general manager Zhu Xiaoxin argued that it was unrealistic to price the legitimate products cheaper than pirate ones. "Every one should do his or her bit to create a favourable environment for legal products," he said.