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China Slams US Piracy Complaint
bingoathome writes with a link to a BBC article on China's criticism of the US over its complaint to the WTO. The Bush administration is breaking its long-standing policy of backroom conversations with Beijing to condemn the country's continued 'failure to address copyright piracy and counterfeiting.' "The US says that China's failure to enforce copyright laws is costing software, music and book publishers billions of dollars in lost sales ... The US has been threatening a WTO complaint against China since 2005. It said on Tuesday that the two cases had been submitted to the WTO. One case claims that Beijing's poor enforcement of copyright and trademark protections violates WTO rules. The other contends that illegal barriers to hamper sales of US films, music and books. "
but how much do legal copies of dvd's sell for? Or rather, how much does the riaa/mpaa want to charge chinese consumers for a DVD ? $20? Maybe it's time for the riaa/mpaa to lower prices and compete with the blackmarket.. there is still money to be made, just don't expect chinese consumers to fork over 15% of their annual income for a lousy hollywood movie.
just like the US does, if they don't like them:0 35210
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/02/1
China and other countries produce and export lots of low quality counterfeit products, including drugs and mecanical parts that can endanger consumers health but the US Gov. is only mad about copies of overpriced products (usually made in China for dirt cheap BTW) to protect the profit of a few cartels.
Strangely all the DVD shops I know of in Shanghai are closed today. There's still street vendors here and there however.
I imagine they'll be open again soon, but it shows that China cares to some extent.
Seriously, though, is this a surprise to anyone? If China will run over defenseless people with an armored personnel carrier, who would expect them to honor the property rights of people who are not from The Celestial Kingdom?
And if the US' only economic advantage over China is in entertainment, is it surprising that they'd go after this?
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
They are already having one hell of a hard time fighting piracy in such a policed country as the US, how exactly do they expect China with its 1.3 billion citizens to tackle this problem?
Also, seeing the poverty and corruption problems in China, I sure hope that they use their money to make life better for their own citizen, then maybe they can start pumping money into an impossible to achieve goal...
And you the US, are gonna do WHAT about the on-line gambling issue that didn't go your way?
Exactly, this is another case of classic US unilateralism. The US government use the UN, WTO and other international groups to get their own way with the rest of the world but then ignore those same groups when the rest of the world has its own issues.
I always remember when some US official was asked why the US didn't recognise the International court of Justice, he replied "because this would allow other nations to bring trials against OUR leaders". The US just doesn't get the idea of "international cooperation", you can't just use collaboration to get your own way without compromise. Perhaps it would help if the US realised that it isn't always right.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
LOL, I love it when the US protests against illegal trade barriers. Surely the foreign steel tariffs and more recently the Brazilian Ethanol/Biofuel tariffs do just the same...!
And someone else posted about China running over it's own ppl in APCs. Need I mention WACO or Rodney King or how about the recent Blue on Blue incident where the US Air Force with 2 A10s blows the crap out of a British Convoy that had the correct orange markers denoting friendlies?
All this proves though is that we can both relate completely unrelated but similar instances of injustice. We should stick to the topic in question which is trading rights between countries and the effect of piracy efforts.
Oriental Hero "I want to live in a city where the Police don't shoot you" Jean Charles de Menezes
I'm going to raise something which will probably be greeted with blank stares...
What about Chinas IP/Cultural penetration in the US? Where's the Chinese equivalent of Britney? What about the Chinese authors in the NY times best sellers list? They account for a large proportion of the world population.
Perhaps China feels that the Cartel media structures of the US are not fairly promoting foreign IP and art?
Piracy is such a way of life in some Asian countries that sellers blatantly sell copied DVDs and CDs on the streets without any perceived concern they could be arrested. The police completely turn a blind eye. In Thailand and Malaysia it's so blatant it's ridiculous. They even have many DVDs you cannot even buy in the respective country due to not being released or even banned, films banned or censored by the Thai censors are regularly available completely uncut. The sellers do nothing to even hide what they're doing. This barely happens period in Europe or North America, why? Because the police actually crack down, close down and prosecute bootleggers. You may see the odd market seller but that's it. Interestingly Japan has created an expensive limited edition culture that you'd think would help piracy but instead people prefer to own official merchandise.
But the world court thing is somewhat sticky because it gets in to constitutional issues. The Constitution is the highest law in the US, above even federal. It can only be changed by a 67% majority vote in congress, and then a vote from 75% of the states. Well, among other things, it guarantees citizens certain rights that the government can't take away (not that it doesn't stop them from trying from time to time). However if you say the world court has jurisdiction over US citizens, over the supreme court, then you are subjecting them to a court that doesn't recognise those rights. Not that they might not have a similar set, but the Constitution is pretty clear on this point.
That's the real issue here, but it highlights a problem with things like a world court. It is hard to have something like a world government when the world can't agree on what kind of laws it should have. I'm going to guess China has a real different idea of what speech should be criminal than the US does. Thus it is kinda hard to have a single judicial system that both would be under.
Well you're wrong because poverty is much greater in china.
[sarcasm]That's one mighty convincing arguement you have there.[/sarcasm] Seriously, where are your supporting facts or sources to back-up your claims? The burden of proof rests on you.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
With bold people pushing the frontiers. When "don't ask what your country can do for you" actually meant something, when it wasn't a blurb spinned by politicians, but actually heeded by them and even the industry, too. Great men and women who wanted to push the boundaries and make the nation (or humanity as a whole) better and more advanced.
Today, the US is what the rest of the "civilized" world is: Fat and afraid. Fat and lazy, unable and unwilling to lift a finger and not caring about tomorrow, not caring what happens to the world around them as long as they can get rich without having to do anything for it. Inventive? At best in the "how to get rich by doing nothing" department.
And afraid that this might change.
Btw, don't feel left out if you're not from the US. That's pretty much true for most of Europe, too. When I look around myself, all I see is fat, lazy and very frightened people.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, it's not.
Price is not a product of the cost of production. It is a function of the value people see in it. If they don't want to pay the cost of the IP, they don't get it.
Looking at the import/export bill, if they gave any leeway to the counterfeiters would be a desaster. Let's look at the import/export bill.
Agriculture? Well, the US has a lot of agriculture, no doubt. Still, it is highly dependent on imports and the exports don't mean a lot (especially with lots of them going to countries that won't ever pay).
Industry? Well, considering that it's way cheaper to produce in the far east, and with Japan and the other Tigers pretty much owning the high tech market (let's shroud the car industry in silence, to protect the guilty), it's not really a big source of foreign money.
Resources? Ever looked at that oil bill alone?
So what's left for exports from the US? Simple: Services and "virtual goods" (IP, content, information, entertainment).
Now, exporting services has a simple problem: You can't ship a haircut around the world. People have to come to your country with their money and spend it there. And if I look at the immigration requirements (even if I promise that I really, really wanna leave again, I wouldn't want to stay there longer than I have to, honestly, I have my ticket here...), I can understand that fewer and fewer people actually want to spend a vacation in a country where the gamble (whether you actually see more of it than a prison cell 'cause you remind someone of someone else) already starts at the airport.
So what's left is virtual property. Content and so on. That's still where the US shines. Movies and music is still a strong export article of the US. Computer programs (Windoze, anyone?), intellectual property and patents held by US corporations...
Imagine what the foreign trade balance would look like if the US backed off here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pretty sad that our biggest beef with China trade-wise is over the profits of the entertainment industry rather than the human rights and pollution issues of their industries that want to sell products here.
Let me tell you what is playing in Beijing cinemas right now: Flyboys, Sixteen Blocks, A Night at the Museum, Eragon, and probably a Hong Kong flick or two.
Not to pass judgment on any of these movies in particular. I enjoyed a couple of them, myself. But do you see the pattern? These are the most popcorn, inconsequential, and super-commercial of Hollywood's output. There isn't a challenging, thought-provoking moment among them. It was a national event when we got Casino Royale, "uncut!" (Those might have been projection glitches, but I have my doubts.)
I mention this because movies are only approved for legal DVD sale if they can pass the censorship to make it into theaters in the first place. The studios are full of shit when they claim that they're losing money, because there are no legal DVDs worth buying in the first place. The legal movies are pretty cheap, they have decent Chinese subtitles, and they're certainly easier to get than the pirated stock. People aren't buying for the same reason ticket revenues are down in the States: the movies suck.
Do you want to see the award-winning art movie that everybody on the internet is talking about? If you're in China, you have to buy it off the street or in a hidden back room. If a Chinese person wants to see a piece of provocative film art about their own country, they have to buy a pirated copy. Even the better popcorn fare is banned: we didn't get Dead Man's Chest because the yarr matey pirates are a bad moral example to the tender, innocent Chinese public.
I work in the Chinese film industry, making domestic commercial movies. We probably lose money to movie piracy (although it was virtually impossible to find an illicit copy of Curse of the Golden Flower- which shattered Chinese BO records). But part of the job description at the office is to stay on top of international trends. There are only two ways to do that: piracy in the office, or massive travel budgets to send the whole office to Hong Kong every couple of weeks- which we can't do either, because the Chinese citizens in the office aren't free to travel there unrestricted.
I know it's too much to ask for principled international leadership from my mother country, but if the United States government would pull their heads out of the MPAA's ass for one minute, I might hope that they would see that piracy isn't what's killing Hollywood's profits in China- the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television is. And they're keeping the domestic industry at a third-world level while they're at it.
How about some WTO threats about that?
(Also, while I'm dreaming, if they could apply some pressure to make the Chinese fish less lead than fish and the air more air than choking soot, that would be fantastic.
Why do I live here, again?)
As everyone can now see, signing the Berne Convention has brought nothing but trouble to the US. Before that the default was for works to be in the public domain and creators had to register for protection. And what really gets me is we did it at a time when creating an electronically searchable database of copyrighted works was becoming a real possibility. I have a great respect for the modern liberal ideals of Europe and would like to see the US incorporate many of them, but Berne is simply unforgivable.
The problem of the Berne convention is not automatic copyright. Automatic copyright protects small and individual producers and allows them to concentrate on creating content instead of being bogged down with formalities. It protects creators from their content being stolen (as in, a draft copy of a book being stolen for example) and published before they could register it and so on.
The real problem is that copyright lasts virtually forever, preventing works from entering the public domain.
US response to China's widespread human rights violations, sweatshop labor conditions, and suppression of dissent: *chirp* *chirp*
US response to China's half-hearted enforcement of US Big Media copyrights: OMG! WTF?!! We must complain and protest most vigorously!!!111oneone!
One thing that was glossed over quite a bit in the article from the Beeb is that the US is actually launching two WTO complaints about China. The CBC article says
It figures -- first they complain that the Chinese aren't selling enough US movies, music, and books. Then when they find a way to start selling them by the truckload, the US complains about that too. =)
There is a spellbook here; eat it? [ynq]
My cat took over the keyboard. I meant to ignore everything you wrote and go off on a tangent, but now it's too late.