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US Targeting China In New Anti-Piracy Drive
oxide7 writes "The United States will make China 'a significant focus' of its beefed-up efforts to fight global piracy and counterfeiting of US goods ranging from CDs to manufactured products, a US official said on Wednesday. The International Intellectual Property Alliance, which represents US copyright industry groups, has estimated lost sales in China at more than $3.5 billion in 2009 due to piracy of US music, movies and software."
Ah give it a rest allready. Sheesh, when will the US learn that not everyone dances to their tune.
How much money have these industries made by exporting manufacturing jobs from the US to China?
a US administration helped to power by media/entertainment groups to give a rest protecting their vested interests? Think again.
I've estimated the US government owes me 1.63 billion dollars in lost sales.
Because of the existance of the US, I lost the chance of selling my ballpen for exactly 1.63 billion dollars.
Yes, my claim is much closer to reality than theirs and no, I won't explain how exactly I'm entitled to money from sales I didn't do, either.
This is the kind of piracy that we need to worry about because it isn't just a matter of copyright infringement, it is a matter of fraud. When you make a knockoff copy of something and sell it to someone as legit, you are defrauding them, and you really are causing economic loss to the company who legitimately makes the product. That is a good deal different from simply copying something without permission. It is something worth trying to shut down because it is a real crime with real victims.
I'm all for spending resources on cracking down on crimes where there are victims. I'm not so interested in spending lots of resources on victimless crimes.
see http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=99
Every kind of human rights group complain about human rights being thrown out of the window... nah, can't have stop building our iphones! (or whatever)
So we look the other way when it comes to human rights, but when the IPAA mentions 3.5 billion dollars... stuff needs to be done!
The Chinese response: Oh okay, we will pay those 3.5 billion. Hell, tell you what, we pay the next decade or so in advance. 35 billion. Now lets see, where can we get some dollars. Oh yeah. Dear USA, we have 35 billion dollars in debts we would like to collect on. Could you please pay us, plus interest and late fees?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We even export our piracy to China. WE INVENTED STEALING
Piracy isn't what it used to be in China. Things are getting cleaned up. The last time I went to the dodgy computer market, all the software which used to be in heaps of boxes was gone. This was kind of annoying as I needed the Chinese version of InDesign - ended up getting it from bittorrent instead.
Retail piracy in general is down, way down. The government is starting to crack down. Pressure from the US government is actually useful in this regard, as it gives the government a foreign bogeyman to blame for shutting down copyright infringement industries. The fake market in Shanghai that I used to buy all sorts of stuff from is a shadow of its former self. Half the junk I can get for cheaper in the States, anyway, because of the exchange rate.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So the chinese have saved themselves $3.5 billion, good for them...
If copyright was enforced then 99% of those chinese people would simply never have had any of this stuff at all. They would be using locally chinese produced media, or freely available media instead. Most of these people simply couldn't afford to pay what US media companies demand.
It does show where the US governments priorities lie tho, they are willing to lean on the chinese over copyrights but couldn't care less about human rights or the environment.
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Cryptome is publishing a Chinese document detailing use of the internet in their country. :)
http://cryptome.org/0001/cn-internet.htm chapter 3 " Guaranteeing Citizens Freedom Of Speech on the Internet "
is hilarious
That's an official position paper that outlines the government position.A good read.
Really funny excerpt : The Constitution of the People's Republic of China confers on Chinese citizens the right to free speech. With their right to freedom of speech on the Internet protected by the law, they can voice their opinions in various ways on the Internet.
hmm ROFL LOL
National debt is not like loan sharking. You do not loan money for whatever terms you like and then call it due at a convenient time. More properly, it is investing in a nation.
So, in the case of the US you can buy treasury securities of various kinds. They vary from T-bills as short as four weeks to T-Bonds as long as 30 years. In the case of a short bill, it is sold at a discount and then pays face value. So If you bought a $1000 1 year T-bill with a 5% yearly interest, you would pay $950 for that note. At the end of 1 year, the government would pay you the face value of $1000. In the case of longer bonds, the government pays you a fixed percentage of interest every 6 months and then the principal when it matures.
Now there are important things to note about this:
1) There is no mechanism for cashing in early. you can't come to the government and demand your money now. It pays at a set time. The only way to get money early is to sell the security to someone else. This is done frequently, they are traded on the open market like other things. However, you cannot get your full value for such a thing. If you try to tell me a $1000 t-bill, I'm not paying you $1000. I might pay you more than you paid if it is close o maturity, but you are going to take a loss over the value of the note.
2) The securities pay in US dollars. That means that you get paid the stated amount in current US dollars when it matures, not your currency. So if something happens to severely devalue US currency, you get less. The government says it'll pay you X many US dollars. It does not promise they are worth a given amount.
3) These are nothing more than IOUs from the government. In fact you don't even get physical notes anymore, it is all just entries in the US treasury. So while it would have a severe impact on their credit, the US government can simply default, meaning refuse to pay on their securities. There is nothing anyone can do about there, no court they can be taken to to order payment.
4) As I noted, the securities are an INVESTMENT. China has invested in them for many reasons, stability, to help back their currency, etc. To get rid of that investment could have some rather negative consequences.
So please, do yourself a favour and learn a bit more on debt and lending in general, but in particular how it works on a national level. It is not at all a loan shark kinds of arrangement. Acting as though it is is rather silly.
And the U.S. will have no other choice but to officially comply.
China holds too much of the US debt, for the US to be demanding ANYTHING.
... owing to China 867.7 billions in May 2010, US will need it (hmmm... think what would happen if China would start dumping US bonds just for the fun of "raising some money to pay for IP breaches").
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Many Chinese do not even follow traffic signals! Piracy should be very low on the teaching scale. Many Chinese do not follow the rules, it is the culture, that is on reason why corruption is so bad in China. The US is just a puppet of the rich multinational corporations. So that is why it the "US" wants to enforce it law upon China. China's National government has done very good in improving the lives of many Chinese, and protecting them. The US economy is sinking fast and the US government is more worried about Wall Street than Main Street. The US should worry about the people not the large Multinational Corporations.
Thats how much US national debt China holds. A measely seven percent.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
this are some of the most common levels of infringement consumers deal with
With the rise of YouTube and other online self-publishing venues, people who would have otherwise remained consumers are becoming amateur producers as well. Now they have to deal with 4. reusing more of a work than fair use allows and 5. coincidental similarities between their own work and an existing non-free work.
What makes you think the lead singer of Herman's Hermits deserves an easy ride?
America: "Stop making bootleg stuff or we'll stop trading with you."
China: "Okay, stop trading with us and we'll make our own stuff for ourselves. We have the factories, and now we have the know-how. All you have left is the know-how."
America: "..."
Microsoft has encouraged the pirating of their software in China by publishing their position that it is better to have Chinese using pirated Windows than other operating systems. I think Windows is a dime on the street in China, and I think that price is about right considering economy of scale and the amount of time Windows has been on the market in one form or another.
Because that would be stupid, China bought US debt for a reason, it's not just like some bar tab accumulated by a dodgy customer. China likes to buy large amounts of foreign currency to allow them to effectively peg the value of the RMB lower. So much so that if one year China decided to import four times as much as usual, it would end the year still slightly in the black. Government bonds allow them to invest that money in a conservative way since the People's Bank of China trusts the US treasury to pay on its debts in the agreed manner at the agreed time.
However, things are changing, China's investments have diversified, specially towards the mining industry and have largely stopped increasing their share of treasury holdings, while continuing to hold some. China is not buying treasury bonds to help the US treasury, it just needs a good place to put US dollars, if it did not want that debt, it can and would divest itself of it pretty quickly.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem