The United States (U.S.) filed two new complaints against China at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) yesterday over copyright policy and restrictions on the sale of American movies, music and books, trade officials said.

The move at the WTO comes a day after U.S. trade representative Susan Schwab said American companies were losing billions of dollars annually from piracy levels in China that "remain unacceptably high."

The Chinese Commerce Ministry yesterday expressed "strong dissatisfaction" at the U.S. action.

"The two cases have been formally submitted," said Magda Siekert, a spokeswoman for the U.S. mission to international organisations in Geneva. The formal requests for consultations were not immediately made available.

Resolution

The U.S. submissions yesterday trigger a 60-day consultation period during which trade negotiators from both countries will try to resolve the disputes. If that fails, the U.S. can ask for the WTO to establish investigative panels. It would likely take years for any retaliatory sanctions to be authorised.

One case contends that Beijing's lax enforcement of copyright and trademark protections violates WTO rules, Schwab told reporters in Washington on Monday. The other argues that Beijing has erected illegal barriers to the sale of U.S.-produced movies, music and books in China.

"Excessively high legal thresholds for launching criminal prosecutions offer a safe harbour for pirates and counterfeiters," the office of the USTR said on its website. "Pirates and counterfeiters who structure their operations to fit below those thresholds face no possibility of criminal sanction."

Is enough being done?

China is one of the world's biggest sources of illegally copied goods ranging from movies, music and designer clothes to sporting goods and medications. But the WTO's scope would focus on whether Beijing has taken suffi-cient action to combat intellectual property theft.

"The Chinese Government has always been firm in protecting intellectual property rights and attained significant achievements in this respect," Commerce Ministry Spokesman Wang Xinpei said in a statement.

Wang criticised the U.S. action and said it "will seriously undermine" economic and trade relations between the two countries.

The U.S. complaints were filed shortly after reports that China plans to buy in excess of US$16.2 billion in U.S. goods when a major delegation visits Washington in May for talks on trade tensions.

The new cases are the latest move against China by the Bush administration, which is trying to deal with rising political anger over America's soaring trade deficit.

The U.S. imbalance with China grew to US$232.5 billion, the highest ever with a single country.

On Tuesday China reported a sharp monthly drop in its ballooning trade surplus with the whole world, saying it fell in March to US$6.9 billion (?€5.2 billion), down from US$23.7 billion (?€18 billion) in February, but economists said the decline was probably only temporary.

Even with the drop, however, China's global export gap for the full January-to-March quarter doubled in size compared with the same period last year, reaching US$46 billion (?€34 billion), according to the figures.

Its surplus last year rose 74 per cent to reach a record US$177.5 billion.

- AP