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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.
What are we, Hamas now? By not completely losing we win?
outside US borders?
What's next? trying to push a world wide patriot act?
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
WTO knows who its soon-to-be-daddy is.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
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.....
If the wto made a ruling against China which will obviously be ignored what are they going to do. Punitive measures? Oh lets stop trade with China, great idea. Kind of a silly system if you ask me.
Did the US outsource their Legal prosecution to the RIAA lawyers? jeez.
Just because the wise US forefathers saw patents as a meaningful concept doesn't mean everyone across the world share the same wisdom.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
Make the US dollar bonds worthless by spending made up USD like... like, um, politicians!
We shouldn't even be trading with China. By doing so we are propping up a repressive regime.
First it was Nixon's ill conceived openess policy with China, then GW allowing them into the WTO.
We would have been better off with India as a manufacturing base.
IPKat has a very nice analysis, as usual, here:
http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2009/01/breaking-news-wto-panel-report-on-us.html.
However, IPKat concludes that it's more of a score-draw than a loss by the US.
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.
In capitalist America, IP laws kill you!
The problem is that American capitalism has already had far too much success in persuading other countries that US law (particularly with regard to IP) applies to everyone else too.
It's often a precondition of so-called "free-trade" agreements that usually result in everyone except the US getting shafted. Hence here in Australia, our FTA has saddled us with IP agreements which are recognised by our own legislative committees approximately as "lamentably and inexcusably flawed". I'm too lazy to check that exact quote, but it's out there in public domain.
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..
Chiang left the mainland in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s he was President of the ROC, of course, but I wasn't aware of any significant numbers of Americans on the mainland during this period, the height of the Cold War. Did you mean "the 1940s," or is there a facet of Sino-American relations of which I am not aware?
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
I wonder how voluntary many countries really enter these agreements. If you do not, the US and some other western countries will view you as a rogue state and boycott you. I feel many countries including China are blackmailed into accepting these agreements.
China has the USA's cajones in a vice right now. The US is stomping on about pirated copies of Caddyshack and Windows being sold throughout China, but what EXACTLY can the US do? Nadda. And China knows it. China will say whatever they want to the WTO, because they now own it. They know that if the USA holds true to the original bargain, and enforces tariffs on the goods imported from China because China is not upholding their end, the cost of goods will skyrocket and the American economy will be worse off than it already is. No one is going to do that. China is holding ALL the cards, and this decision is just another charade in this dance. As long as this IP battle goes on, the USA gets hurt. Thanks a lot, entertainment industry. And I thought the story behind Pluto Nash was bad...
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).
Just because the wise US forefathers saw patents as a meaningful concept doesn't mean everyone across the world share the same wisdom.
Well, China became a party to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1985, so this is not exactly news. (Also, the U.S. complaint didn't have anything to do with patents)
Though no one is going to deny the influence of the U.S. in pushing stronger IP protection throughout the world, patents by no means originated with the U.S. Furthermore, as a practical matter, since the vast majority of countries in the world are parties to the Berne Convention, the Paris Convention, and TRIPS, even if they don't "share the same wisdom" they are legally obliged to act as if they do.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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.
When you start talking severe economic moves, the US could always respond in kind. What happens if they declare the bonds to be worthless, as in they aren't going to pay? That negatively impacts their credit of course, but then maybe they are able to successfully spin it with their allies so that it doesn't. China is waging "economic war" against the US so they HAVE to respond in kind, etc, etc, etc. Or perhaps as you suggest there are actual war overtones and as part of that, the US freezes all China's assets, including the bonds. They find a semi-legal way to make them worthless, a way that doesn't piss off anyone else (and in fact maybe makes other bond holders happy since it doesn't devalue their bonds).
There are many people who act like it is a case of China holding all the cards, and the US being at their mercy. Actually it's more a case of economic mutually assured destruction. While it is likely China could cause havoc to the US economy, it is a near certainty that the US response would decimate the Chinese economy. Hell it might not even be any real response. China trys to tank the US economy, the US doesn't respond, the economy tanks. Americans pull extremely far in to their shells and stop buying everything but essentials, and specifically good from China (since you know the media would have a field day with this). The Chinese economy grinds to a halt and now they have a major problem of civic unrest.
Basically it isn't something either country stands to gain from thus it isn't likley to happen. China wants the US happy and buying their goods.
if the common sense won?
IMHO democracy and independence of countries is more natural than IP rights.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You mean, except for the part where the party doing the infringement is now China rather than a two bit pirate. It's not any different, it just happens to be a bribe. Pay up for protection, or perhaps we'll use the bootlegs to undermine your business.
Actually, it's a bit more than that.
I can make a bunch of copies to give away to people in china. A custom official can then confiscate those copies, then donate them to a charity which just gives them away anyways.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
It sounds like they refuse to prosecute small-damage cases where no monetary gain was at issue -- they will prosecute crimes for commercial gain, but not for example, go after individual file sharers.
Sounds like China has more common sense than our RIAA-paid legislators, but this isn't surprising given the insanity of suing users for $220K damages over ~$16 dollars or less of damage.