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China Announces Punishments For Intellectual-Property Theft (bloomberg.com)
China has announced an array of punishments that could restrict companies' access to borrowing and state-funding support over intellectual-property theft. The news comes after the G20 Summit in Argentina, where the Trump Administration agreed to hold off on tariff action for at least 90 days as they negotiate to resolve specific U.S. complaints. Bloomberg reports: China set out a total of 38 different punishments to be applied to IP violations, starting this month. The document, dated Nov. 21, was released Tuesday by the National Development and Reform Commission and signed by various government bodies, including the central bank and supreme court. China says violators would be banned from issuing bonds or other financing tools, and participating in government procurement. They would also be restricted from accessing government financial support, foreign trade, registering companies, auctioning land or trading properties. In addition, violators will be recorded on a list, and financial institutions will refer to that when lending or granting access to foreign exchange. Names will be posted on a government website. "This is an unprecedented regulation on IP violation in terms of the scope of the ministries and severity of the punishment," said Xu Xinming, a researcher at the Center for Intellectual Property Studies at China University of Political Science and Law. The newly announced punishments are "a security net of IP protection" targeting repeat offenders and other individuals who aren't in compliance with the law, he said.
will find some negative spin to this
China Announces Punishments For Intellectual-Property Theft
Yawn ... call me when they are enforcing this regardless of the nationality of the owner of the stolen IP. The way things are at the moment China benefits from rigorous patent enforcement in the west but Chinese companies enjoy considerable priority and get massive preferential treatment over foreign ones when it comes to patent enforcement on Chinese soil. There is no reason to believe IP enforcement will be any different.
Things change.
Once, America did not care about IP. Europeans were fuming at the rampant patent and copyright infringement, and blatant espionage to steal trade secrets.
American factories were mass-producing cheap knock-offs of British goods. Printers paid no royalties.
Eventually, the American companies started innovating, and American writers became common. So some of the states started to make and enforce IP laws.
This annoyed a bunch of people, so they moved West to avoid patent law, and that is how we got Hollywood.
Why America was the China of the 19th century.
This is not an excuse, not saying China's theft should be ignored. Just adding some context.
If the Chinese were genuinely serious about this, they would shut down (or blacklist/apply these new restrictions to) all the hundreds of factories producing bootlegs of everything from smartphones to LEGO bricks to golf clubs to handbags.
So, the Chinese government has laid out punishments to be meted out by the Chinese government. However, the real meat of the any punishment depends on who gets to determine guilt and mete out punishment. I assume that the Chinese government would reserve that right for themselves, as would any sovereign nation. If so, can we expect any change from the current situation? If the US government determines that Huawei is guilty of stealing IP, would the Chinese government even bother to consider any punishments, or would they bog down any investigation in bureaucratic maneuvering or assign blame to individual scapegoats instead of the accused Chinese companies.
Here's hoping the IP non-sense will end soon. We're all just wasting time and resources fighting a losing battle otherwise.
Not holding my breath, you can try to convince us all day long that creating IP is a cost free exercise but it isn't. So instead of pontificating about how IP rights are the work of Satan and information yearns to be free, can you come up with any concrete proposals for a mechanism by which people can recoup the money they sank into IP creation? Something besides donations and collecting the imaginary goodwill dollars they get from all the people pirating their work? ... because at some point in some way, in a world where you are completely free to profit off of anybody else's IP without compensating them for it, the IP creator still has to pay the bills for it to be worthwhile for him/her to bother.
Your grandma may have told you: be careful what you wish for.
1. If the claim of Chinese intellectual property violation is not exaggerated and that it will be fixed soon, then that would give American companies more incentives to do more research and development in China, tapping low cost engineers and other college graduates, instead of hiring expensive U.S. engineers.
2. China already files more patents than any other countries. The natural trend would be that there will be more patent trolls suing everyone including American companies, just like those opening up offices in East Texas.
3. once China enforce harder, their hi-tech industry will only become more competitive.
Eventually what happened was that, as China’s domestic copyright industries found themselves competing with cheap knock-offs of foreign goods, they pressed the Chinese government to fortify the IP enforcement process on its own. (To put this in perspective, this is also what happened a century earlier in the US, which until 1890 failed to protect foreign works, and then waited yet another century before joining the major international copyright treaty.)