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How the US Lost Its China Complaint On IP
An anonymous reader writes "The World Trade Organization yesterday released its much-anticipated decision involving a US complaint against China over its protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights. The US quickly proclaimed victory, with newspaper headlines trumpeting the WTO panel's requirement that China reform elements of its intellectual property laws. Yet the reality is somewhat different. As Michael Geist notes, the US lost badly on key issues such as border measures and criminal IP enforcement, with the international trade body upholding the validity of China's laws."
IP laws are ridiculous imho.
I guess what would happen is the US would go cold turkey...
And China would retaliate by selling all their US dollar bonds. You think the economic crisis is bad _NOW_?
- These characters were randomly selected.
If only 30% of the stories relate to Microsoft, Slashdot is probably under-reporting... Windows is on a far higher percentage of PCs than 30%. You should be happy the amount of Linux stories doesn't accurately reflect the installed base.
In reality, Slashdot focuses more on Linux and less on Windows than any simple news aggregator would. They do have a bias, but it's exactly the opposite of your conspiratorial theory. So, no, nobody sensible thinks Microsoft shilling is going on here. In fact, it would require a worrisome disconnect from reality to hold that idea.
I suspect a trip to most countries in Africa would refresh the mind as to what it means to do what one needs to do to survive. It certainly has nothing to do with putting a pirated song on your knockoff iPod.
But it does have a hell of a lot to do with selling a CD of pirated songs for 5 yuan to somebody who can afford an ipod.
Try not to automatically assume someone is an idiot just because you don't immediately see where they are coming from.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As rights holders are quite fond of telling everyone: you own the plastic of which the DVD is made, we own (and license) the rest. Now the boot is on the other foot, and the rights holders don't like it. The Chinese government isn't selling rights owners the IP (which the holder already owns). What they are selling them is a lump of plastic. There's no profit involved. All the Chinese government is saying is "we get the free lunch, not you". Quite justified, especially since the government has incurred policing costs.
As the USA just ignores WTO when it suits them, like in the case of Internet Gambling and Antigua, do they honestly expect a country like China to pay any attention to WTO? And god help USA if it try's to "punish" China, as China could make the dollar worth less than a Zimbabwean dollar and blast the US economy back to barter system overnight
So we would have to go back to something more balanced and actually produce goods in the US again? I fail to see a downside, considering I am old enough to remember when the bulk of the goods you could go out and buy here were produced here, and the economy was perfectly fine and the middle class was growing with actual savings and we didn't have near as much debt (personal/corporate/governmental). This is one of those things you have to have experienced, it is probably too hard to just muse on it intellectually, but yes, the US is large enough to be able to do this, to set as a primary goal a robust internal trading economy. If you look at it, it is a 50 state trading union, with an established common language and monetary unit. Now we can't support a huge bloated tick class of do nothing office wealth rearrangers hanging around million dollar offices who need bailouts when their gambling debts go bad with a domestic manufacturing economy, or some giant governmental "worker" base, but again, that isn't a downside.
The other method, taken as a whole, this globalization that completely ignored a lot of the reality on the ground such as foreign nations ignoring IP etc, has failed and the economy is in such a mess now that all sorts of wild assed schemes are needed to "save" it. I contend it is better to let the past few decades long experiment in alleged "investment" ponzi schemes and get rich quick schemes and so on just finish failing and rebuild back to the older model that really worked, and improve on that one instead. There were flaws then of course, but we threw the baby out with the bath water by "investing" in their "make china and a few other nations and a handful of CEOs rich while the rest of everyone else went into debt" model. That one has been mostly epic fail, the unemployment numbers and balance of trade numbers and debt load and whatnot recent bad economic news prove that without a doubt.
We traded a few years of cheap gadgets and an exploding debt crisis for more moderate and sustainable and balanced growth and security. I'd rather have had the latter. If their notion of globlization worked, we wouldn't be seeing all these western nations and companies and banks failing right now or going through various economic crises. You cannot borrow your way to wealth, eventually you have to work for it. You can't printing press up more money and call that a sound economy, that will never, ever work, money needs to be based on produced wealth, not unsustainable credit. Keynesian economics and what passes for globalization now are a *fraud* and have failed, it does no good to think rearranging them again with words that push those notions will fix the fundamental errors of that sort of economic system. It needs to be abandoned.
if the common sense won?
IMHO democracy and independence of countries is more natural than IP rights.