Just 10 days after the emblem for the Beijing Olympic Games was made public, pirated T-shirts carrying the logo have popped up at street markets in Shanghai and Beijing.

When shanghai Daily visited the city's Xiangyang Road Clothing Bazaar yesterday, there were no such shirts on public display, but after asking around, a reporter quickly found one stall owner quietly selling them.

The vendor said the T-shirts arrived from Beijing on Monday. "It's selling very well," she said, for which she is asking 55 yuan (US$6.60) - far less than the price of the very limited number of legal shirts.

The beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympics in 2008 said that so far it has only authorized a few stores to sell T-shirts with the new logo, and all of them are in the capital city. Those shirts are all priced above 100 yuan.

While the committee is busy licensing companies to use the logo on a whole host of goods, including hats, jackets and key rings, those goods will only be sold in large stores, not street mar-kets, one of its employees said.

The shanghai Industrial and Commercial Adminis-trative Bureau said it hasn't received any tips about the pirated T-shirts, but it promised to take immediate action once it hears about pirates ripping of the logo.

"We can use two methods to stop violators. One is to receive complaints from the organizing committee because only the committee knows which stores are authorized (to sell the goods)," said Jiang Yinghong, a spokeswoman for the bureau. "The other is that if our officers uncover such products being sold at stores without a letter of authorization they will ask for confirmation from the committee."

Those caught using the logo illegally face a maximum fine of five times their illegal income or 50,000 yuan, whichever is higher.

The emblem is a combin-ation of the five Olympic rings, a Chinese seal of the character 'jing' drawn to look like a running athlete and the words "Beijing 2008" in English. Jing means capital and is a nickname for Beijing.

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