A trade group led by top Hollywood studios like Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros has signed an anti-piracy pact with China, making a small but significant advance in a long-running battle against endemic piracy in the country.
The Motion Picture Association hailed it as progress in a fight against the rampant piracy in China that costs Western firms an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Piracy has been a perennial thorn in the side of US-China relations. The group's announcement comes days after a US delegation led by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez descended on Beijing for trade and intellectual property talks.
Under their new memorandum of understanding, the US movie association - whose members also included Walt Disney Co, General Electric's Universal unit and Viacom's Paramount - will send Chinese regulators a list of movies scheduled for release in the country every three months.
The agreement provided for stricter policing of counterfeit films and stricter prosecution, the film association said in a statement released late on Friday.
"All home video products that are available in the marketplace prior to the legitimate home video release date in China will be deemed illegal... and forfeited," the group said.
"And when a criminal copyright infringement offence has been committed, the case will be prosecuted," it added.
The agreement between the association and China's Ministry of Culture and State Administration of Radio, Film and Television is targeted at curtailing piracy of newly released movies.
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