Winning the copyright battle in China
– Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own —
When it comes to protecting intellectual property in China, the United States often feels that its pleas are falling on deaf ears. Its best hope is that China recognizes that copyright protection is in its own interests. To achieve that, Washington needs to push for changes from within.
After a fruitless decade of lobbying China on intellectual property, Washington has reached for the microphone. This week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a high-profile international forum on intellectual property in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province and best known as both China’s manufacturing hub and the global centre for intellectual property theft.
Guangdong understands it cannot hold on to both titles forever. Its reforming leader Wang Yang has vowed to build an innovative Guangdong, but he and his deputies understandably do not want to be criticized in public. The U.S. delegation included high-ranking officials such as Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, but the very man they hoped to engage with didn’t show up.
Foreign pressure can help, but changes rarely happen in public. First, both parties need to agree on what they are trying to achieve. As a manufacturer for the rest of the world, China has historically seen little upside in protecting copyright. The United States needs to convince Beijing that, if it wants to develop its own products, then protecting copyright is important.
Huawei Technologies, the telecom equipment maker based in Guangdong, could be a good partner in this. In 2003, Cisco sued Huawei for copyright violations, but dropped the suit after Huawei agreed to stop selling some products. Now, Huawei has emerged as a strong protector of copyright. Last year the company filed the largest number of patents in the world.
Song Liuping, Huawei’s chief legal officer, advocates increasing the penalty for IP theft, a view shared by Americans. But he thinks the problem is not the lack of an adequate legal system or even lax enforcement, but the absence of a culture in China that values designs, patents, and copyrights.
I just bought windows7 for under 1 US Dollar in China. Even if I could not find it in China I could download it with a torrent. You think that is going to stop? That is like trying to stop drugs in the US. You arrest Gmoney and the next day his boy JT is out on the same block with some fresh product. You want copyright protection for big monopoly corporations? Tell them to quit overpricing their products. Windows7 should only cost a few dollars and be mass produced. The Chinese are showing them how to do it. Instead of crying maybe they should start learning. You put them out of business by eliminating the incentive.