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US, China Working On Intellectual Property Rights
itwbennett writes "US Attorney General Eric Holder is visiting Beijing this week to discuss how China and the US can better coordinate efforts to stop intellectual property rights violations. 'One of the things that has happened in recent years is that counterfeiting has become a globalized industry,' said Christian Murck, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. To effectively shut down these operations, cross-country efforts at strengthening global enforcement like Holder's visit to China are crucial, he added. Coinciding with Holder's visit, China announced it will launch a new national campaign to crack down on intellectual property rights violations. The campaign will take aim at the production and distribution of pirated goods such as DVDs and software products. Violations relating to registered trademarks and patents will also be targeted. The campaign will last for half a year. The commercial value of pirated software in China, at $7.5 billion, is second only to that in the US, where it is $8.3 billion, according to the Business Software Alliance and IDC."
Coincidental timing after China's latest strangling of rare earths, yes?
Sorry was my first...
Anyhow, as commentary, I doubt this will go much of anywhere... much like you can find pirated DVDs sold by crackheads in the NYC subway... trying to dissuade or even outright prevent IP theft, etc. from occurring in a place like China is absurd.
As I've found out in government, rules, laws and otherwise are there to make certain people feel better but rarely do they help or actually enforced universally and without bias. Sorry... just feeling a little malaise at this point.
Now these numbers are certainly reliable; they come from the BS Alliance!
As opposed discussing how to coordinate efforts to stop human rights violations.
WTF!? First post getting modded up? The world is coming to its end ...
I disabled "dynamic discussions" in my prefs, and the problem went away.
That might be coincidence though. Just as an experiment, try going into your prefs and just saving what's already there. What's a "dynamic discussion" anyway?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So by logic then, I think the release of the new Battleship film should lend itself to an interesting scenario....
Chinese (but Nigerian 409 flagged) cargo vessel carrying pirated copies of the Battleship movie, filmed in VHS-C and upscaled on an iMac knockoff with a pirated copy of iMovie in the nearest combination opium-den multiplex, gets sunk by a U.S. Cruiser outside of the Port of Los Angeles... damn, you sunk my Battleships?!
Just sayin'
Just replace the FBI warning at the beginning with the message, "this movie brought to you by the Dalai Lama".
Then sit back and watch the Chinese government crack down on pirated DVDs with a vengeance...
Eh. I disagree.
If China chose to crackdown on illegal DVD sellers, they could do it just as effectively as the US did it (DMCA makes it illegal), but with the additional punishment of serving hard time in the Chinese version of the Gulag.
China simply doesn't want to. They are like the US in the 1800s, with very little protection for foreign authors.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I don't believe for a second any agreement China comes to agree upon would be honored. They haven't respected the intellectual property of ANY foreign country for decades, and I don't think a stern talking-to from the 'richest' and 'most powerful' country in the world is going to help.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
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China has long viewed American pre-eminence in the region as a historical accident and an aberration. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) feels enormously uncomfortable existing in a regional order that is based not just on open trade, freedom of the seas and rule-of-law, but also on a democratic community backed by American naval power and military alliances. Look through Chinese strategic documents over the past decade and around four-fifths are about how best to bind, dilute, circumvent or supersede American power and influence.
Rudd is correct to suggest that China has become a "major stakeholder" in the regional and global system. But the broad-brush approach by America and its partners in Asia has been to encourage China to be a "responsible stakeholder" as it rises – one that will increasingly uphold and strengthen the existing order rather than seek to challenge or subvert it. But the latter is precisely what Beijing is looking to do, even as it has been a significant beneficiary of the current system.
Washington erroneously assumes it can shape Chinese goals and purposes. While encouraging China to be a responsible stakeholder is seen as an end-game in the US, internal debates within China reveal that Beijing sees behaving as a responsible stakeholder as a way to bide its time while it builds what it terms Chinese "comprehensive national power."
The responsible stakeholder approach is designed to entrench China as a status quo power because it has been allowed to benefit from the current system. For example, China benefits enormously from the US naval role in the South China Sea, which helps trade and commerce to thrive by protecting trade routes. Yet while the US devotes ships, troops and money to these efforts, China benefits as a security free-loader in the region instead of a trusted contributor.
China has not become an entrenched stakeholder within the US-led region. Indeed, its disruptive claims to over four-fifths of the South China Sea have only intensified, rather than faded, as it continues to rise within the existing order. This approach assumes there is no alternative for emerging states but to compete within the existing open and liberal order.
The responsible stakeholder framework does not account for the fact that rising participants – especially genuinely powerful ones – can seek to gradually dismantle and redesign the current order from within. Subversion and "winning without fighting," rather than confrontation and contest, is the prudent Chinese strategy for undermining both the US and the strength of Washington’s security alliances and partnerships in Asia-Pacific.
The responsible stakeholder framework also assumes that Chinese interests and ambitions are elastic and can be molded according to the circumstances of China's rise. This argument ignores compelling historical and contemporary evidence that China is predisposed to seek leadership of Asia and to recast the regional order according to its preferences. After all, regaining its paramount place in the region is inextricable from reversing what Chinese history books describe as 150 years of humiliation at the hands of western and Japanese powers.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/China-power-economic-west-foreign-relations-policy-pd20100506-579DV?opendocument&src=rss
Unfortunately there's many similarities between interwar Germany and China a
Human rights take a back seat to copyrights.