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Chinese President Vows To Boost Intellectual Property Protection (afr.com)
hackingbear writes: In the opening of China's first import-themed trade fair, President Xi Jinping promised tougher penalties for intellectual property theft, a key concern of the Trump administration, in front of leaders and executives from 3,600 companies from more than 170 countries. China has been steadily advancing intellectual property protection over the years. In addition to filing twice as many patents as the U.S. in 2017, up nearly 14 folds from 2001, it is also increasingly being selected as a key venue for patent litigation by non-Chinese companies, as litigants feel they are treated fairly as foreign plaintiffs won the majority of their patent cases in 2015 (though that likely attracts patent trolls). China's journey from piracy to protection models the journeys of the U.S. which had blatantly violated intellectual properties in building its modern industry.
The #1 thing they need to do if they are serious about combating IP theft is to stamp out all the bootlegging that goes on in their country.
LEGO have recently won a court case against a major Chinese bootlegger but other than a minor fine and possibly a need to redesign or stop selling a few products (out of the many bootleg products they currently make and sell around the world) it wont do a thing to stop the knock-offs.
Enforcement action by the government and its agencies to shut down the bootlegging (of everything from LEGO to designer bags to golf clubs to baby formula) would be the single biggest thing the Chinese government could do to show the world that it is serious about respecting intellectual property rights.
I'll believe it when I see them actually enforcing this. Besides, the Chinese government doesn't consider it theft when they take it because they have laws that compel you to comply. Got a factory in China? Yeah, it's at least 51% owned by the Chinese so that (surprise!) they can insist that all IP be handed over.
Nothing is changing here, it's just words. The idea here is to fool Xi's US counterpart.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There is copyright, patent law, etc. But "intellectual property" is just a term coined by people who want it to be a general system to forbid unpaid thoughts. The more people repeat it, the more people think it actually exists. It does not.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
China?
Boost intellectual property protection?
*inhales deeply*
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Does anyone else think this article reads like propaganda? My first thought when I read this is that it might have been written by someone from the Chinese government.
They have a fairly consistent pattern of how they present ideas, including the choice of words used -- anything that China does that's in their favor is their "sovereign right" or "internal affair" and anything that anyone does that's against China's benefit (real or perceived) is "wrong" or "a mistake".
The part that especially got me was the last sentence that basically admits to committing piracy, but defends it in the same breath saying 'Well that's what the US did to build their industry'.
For the US mostly. China now thinks they benefit more from IP protections than from not having them and that simply means they produce more value now from their own IP than from things they copy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In early America History, there was little effort spent on uphold foreign intellectual property claims. For example:
Samuel Slater was granted US patents on textile machinery that he copied from British mills that he had worked in. At the time it was illegal to export those designs from the UK.
Mark Twain was famously a proponent of perpetual copyright, on the premise that intellectual property is property and thus a limited term is a taking of that property, but he took that position only in his later years once he had a significant corpus that might be valuable after he died. When he was younger and consumed more writing than he produced he was quite in favor of cheap books printed in the US that paid no royalties to foreign writers.
By that logic, do laws even exist? After all, they're social fabrications that have no physical manifestation in the real world, other than that which we create for them.
My point is, of course these things exist. I'll assent to the notion that "intellectual property" may be a misnomer, since you simply cannot own thoughts in the same way that you can own a physical item, but I've never heard anyone try to use it that way. So far as I've ever heard the term used, "intellectual property" is simply the catch-all phrase used to refer to ideas protected by the sorts of laws you're talking about, be they copyright, trademark, utility/design patent, or some other form of protection. Again, "intellectual property" may not be the best way of referring to those things, but it's the best we've got until a more accurate phrase catches on. Feel free to suggest an alternative.
Now, if people were using the term to argue true ownership over certain thoughts, A) that'd be absurd, and B) I'd agree that we have a problem. Thankfully, so far as I've seen, no one is (yet) making that argument, and I don't think we're on any sort of slippery slope to reaching that point, despite certain aspects of IP law going differently than we would like (e.g. seemingly endless copyright extensions, ambiguous patents, overly aggressive trademark defenses, etc.).