Results tagged “intellectualproperty”

Much like China's ongoing efforts against actual piracy, it seems that the government has been taking steps to curb piracy of the intellectual variety. Shifting from targeting individual sellers to wholesalers and manufacturers, Shanghai's "Cultural Inspection Team" has apparently confiscated over 20,000 pirated cds and 5,000 books in 246 "significant" busts in preparation for the Expo. If you do the math, though, that's about 100 cds/books per bust, which doesn't seem that significant to us. As it seems the goods aren't even made in Shanghai, we're not altogether too impressed.

• U.S. Objects to China’s Web Filtering [NYTimes.com] The Obama administration lodged a formal protest on Wednesday with the Chinese government over its plan to force all computers sold in China to come with software that blocks access to certain Web sites.
• Do China And India Really Want Stronger Intellectual Property? [Techdirt] "Over the past few months, I have been researching the role that intellectual property plays in China and India, with specific attention to the frequent calls for increased protection in those countries. I believe that a careful and critical review of national goals, potential solutions and likely outcomes will, in fact, make intellectual property harmonization a disagreeable mechanism for bringing China and India to continued global prestige."
• World of Warcraft Languishes Offline in China [PC World] "A weeks-long World of Warcraft server outage in China has driven masses of players there to the Taiwanese server or to other games while a new operator takes the reins of the Blizzard Entertainment blockbuster in China. A Blizzard representative Wednesday declined to estimate when World of Warcraft would come back online in China."
• China reclaims $4 billion of embezzled public money [International | Reuters] "China has recovered 26.77 billion yuan ($3.92 billion) of public money that was embezzled last year, the country's top audit official said in a report seen Thursday. Some 30 people involved in 116 cases had been arrested and sentenced, the official Xinhua news agency quoted Liu Jiayi, head of the National Audit Office, as saying. Another 117 received punishment according to Communist Party rules, Xinhua said, without elaborating."
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Not sure how long this clothing store has been in existence on the northwest corner of Shaanxi Nan Lu and Changle Lu, but we just noticed it on Sunday. The Chinese characters on the sign — 兴昌祥服饰 — means "auspicious, prospering and flourishing clothing." Mr. Deniro's entry into the Shanghai market is further proof of what Shanghaiist has been writing about the actor ever since his 1965 debut: He's been riding Liv Tyler's coattails his entire career.

As the convential wisdom goes, China will not respect other's intellectual property rights (IPR) until its own IPR needs protection. If this is true, then IPR in China recently took a significant step forward as the Financial Times is reporting that a litigious Shenzhen USB flash drive manufacturer Netac has hired Morgan Lewis & Bockius to sue New Jersey computer hardware manufacturer PNY Technologies for infringing upon Netac's patent for USB flash memory drives, or key drives (that's US Patent #6,829,672 for you IP boffins out there).