Slashdot Mirror
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."
Do China's border measures, which allow customs officials to donate, auction, or sell to the rights holder confiscated goods, violate TRIPS?
(FTFA)
China can take your bootleg XP discs on grounds you pirated them...and then sell them? lolwut?
THL phish sticks
I spend a great deal of time in China. The real crux of the problem is that there is a WIDE gulf between the law and enforcement of the law (unless it involves anti-government behavior...then the gulf narrows quickly).
I can easily go to any one of hundreds of locations that I know of (and I'm a damn foreigner) in Beijing and buy openly pirated movies and software. Sure, it is illegal to sell that stuff per the law books, but the government just doesn't care. And when they make some noise about caring, it's VERY temporary, the press gets their story and photos, and then it's back to business as usual.
Government officials are profiting directly from winking at this illicit trade so there's little incentive for those lower on the totem poles to rock the boat. It's not uncommon for the owner of one of these illicit DVD/CD fabs to bring in the relative of some party official in as a "silent partner" to keep the heat off. Welcome to China. Now be quiet and enjoy your 10RMB DVD (complete with fancy packaging and liner notes) that can be had in most subway stations and street corners in Beijing...er...roughly 7% of the price I'd pay at my local Best Buy for the same title in similar packaging.....
It seems quite fair to ask that the rights holder pay the cost of production if they choose to take possession the bootleg product, as they are then free to sell it for retail price. Why should the rights holder get a bunch of free product, which they would otherwise have to have paid to produce? If they rights holder doesn't want to retail the bootleg product themselves they can refuse to buy it.
In this case the Chinese government seems to be ahead of the US in applying market principles..
Nuclear escalation over imaginary property may be retarded, but so is the "my penis is bigger than your penis" argument that this has become.
The U.S would not be remotely destroyed by China in a land war. In fact, I don't think they could take East LA without outnumbering the people there five to one.
You cannot compare a police action against Iraq against an invasion from China. There are two different motives. One is complete destruction, the other is to force a regime change. China would have the same problems on U.S soil as the U.S has on Iraqi soil.
It's a completely stupid argument anyways. The U.S could never start a land war against China, and China could never start a land war against the U.S. How on Earth could the U.S establish a beach head anywhere near China that the Chinese military could not obliterate within hours? Do you really think the U.S Navy has enough assets to throw against China to maintain a successful beach head to begin moving troops and assets in preparation for strategic operations against targets inland? Not in our wildest dreams. China does not have enough assets to do it either. High numbers of troops don't mean diddly crap when they are thousands of miles away from their targets.
There is no way that either side can move that many troops uncontested across the Pacific Ocean. It's impossible, unless performed with absolute stealth. What then? 2 million Chinese against California where a considerable civilian population is armed? National Guard, Army, Marines, Air Force responding?
I think you watched too much Red Dawn. The real challenges in moving assets, maintaining communication and supply lines, and overwhelming the opposition with numbers or technology are not just non-trivial, but damn near insurmountable for the U.S and China with respect to each other.
The only option in a war between us would nuclear or economically based. We would need to destroy infrastructure and targets remotely. That would not last very long as both sides are pretty damn good at it.
Furthermore, from the Chinese perspective they would only want our complete destruction if it came to it, which does not involve a land war. They have enough problems with their own people struggling against the government. They don't want the task of trying to oppress U.S Citizens and pushing their own political ideologies onto us. Hell, they have not even really done that with Hong Kong.
"These are agreements the US and China both entered into voluntarily."
Of course its not the whole country who are behind this, its a tiny minority of (honest?) politicians who have signed this. A lot of people are against the ability to do a job once and then expect to get paid over and over for it again.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
In our defense, I don't think you should legislate morals. But that's all I can say I agree with. Removing a requirement to register your copyright, and mandatory copyright notices aren't a great idea IMO. Please note though, that in the case of TRIPS it wasn't just the US. Corporations generally don't belong to a country but will have a lobbying presence in many. Many EU nations and Japan are just as much to blame for TRIPS as the US and arguing otherwise just shows how biased you are.
IP laws are the reason the GPL works.
Seriously, with IP, the US would not be relevant in the global economy. IP is a major export from the US, and without it, we could not possibly sustain an economy based on producing goods in other countries.
What is ridiculous is the tolerance the government seems to have for IP abuse.
Palm trees and 8
The way the U.S. Constitution is set up is quite unique with regards to international treatises and agreements. Once the U.S. enters into an international treatise, it is not only bound to act in accordance with the treatise in international relations, but the treatise also becomes a law of the land. And not only is it a law of the land, it is considered on par with other constitutional law, i.e., supreme over other laws.
Because of this very unique structure (I am unaware of other major political players with similar constitutional provisions), the U.S. tends to have more of a vested interest in either trying to change the terms of an agreement so that it falls more in line with their own laws, or to abstain entirely from an international treatise (e.g., Kyoto).
You mean: many people everywhere is guilty of violating them, esp. in countries where the cost of software is a much greater proportion of income than in developed countries.
So then it's OK for the developed world to subsidize software that people don't really need in the first place?
The Chinese government currency manipulates to take American jobs, invest in the US to avoid paying it's workers a decent wage, and somehow they're entitled to free ride on my purchases.
I'm sorry, I'm not really seeing the justification. I could sort of understand if it were something like medicine or the means to grow food, but this is a set of items that for the most part can be replaced and are definitely not vital to life.
And for non-China countries, there's still that last paragraph. I'm not sure what the point of pirating software is when there are more pressing things to do, and software programs for free that do just fine.