China Announces Punishments For Intellectual-Property Theft (bloomberg.com) 67
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.
I'm sure the anti-Trumpers... (Score:2, Insightful)
will find some negative spin to this
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His move to get China to respect IP will be at least as effective as his move to disarm North Korea.
Do the US negotiators seriously believe this will change anything, or are they just playing along in order to claim a propaganda victory?
Re:I'm sure the anti-Trumpers... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure the anti-Trumpers will find some negative spin to this
China has some very excellent and stringent environmental protection laws. Why does China have a shitty environmental record? Simple, China only enforces the environmental protection laws on foreign companies as tool to keep them from being competitive.
What you need to realize is that "China First" has always been China's policy and this will do nothing to change that. What will likely happen is that China will simply demand the IP using it's existing laws and then share it as part of the government funding. China is a dictatorship and dictators only pretend to play fair.
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Say what you will about Trump, I would argue this trade war is because Trump agrees with you; China is always China first. The difference here is that this trade war is about the US showing it's teeth, and altering China's calculus on this.
While you're right China is about "China first", the complex game here is that Trump is showing that "China first" is better served by not stealing IP, because the US has the ability to cause economic damage and weather China's response. Say what you will about China's
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Yes. This.
The reality is, as China's lot in life improves -- much due to their own work, its citizens are certainly better off, but this also causes a raise in cost for foreign firms buying from China.
Most people don't want to see impoverishment of others, only that their own lot in life not be hindered. And IP theft is one way that China is significantly hurting the livelihood of others.
There was a case I recall, where a company made fish finders. They started to notice all sorts of warranty claims that
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It's too early to know the outcome. Giving lip-service and token actions to reform plans has happened quite often in the past, but the follow-through is where it usually fails.
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No need. Don't care.
Like most of the Trump issues, the China trade issue is just a showy distraction to keep people, especially the Trump people, from seeing the real issues. It is the misdirection of a gang of thieves.
China hasn't taken our money. It has gone to the upper 1% who have had a triple digit percentage increase in real income over the past 40 years while the rest of us have averaged 1% a year. Simply going back to the wealth distribution ratios of 40 years ago without changing the total amount o
Let me know when the pro-Trumpers... (Score:2)
... are bragging about something that actually changed in the world as opposed to an announced policy/summit/meeting that is just hot air./p.
Re:I'm sure the anti-Trumpers... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's take the commitment made by China as with most of the other "commitments" Trump has forced out of China so far.
"We promise to consider doing this...."
"We promise to consider doing that...."
"Now that we've completely collapsed the entire American soy bean market value, we promise to buy some at pennies on the dollar but we don't really need them that badly since we bought out South America's supply and they agreed to plant more."
Let's also consider that my company and its customers are cancelling or placing on "indefinite hold" billions of dollars in American purchases as we look for non-American suppliers because we don't trust the volatility of the American dollar or the American tariff system. So, if we commit to "buying American", we can't be sure that our 5+ year commitments are safe since they can easily inflate by 10-25% at any time due to increased American import costs as well as lack of stability of the dollar. We are also holding off on stateside investments since the dollar could rebound 10% with no hope of recovery at any time. So... put simply... it will probably be 2-3 years before we buy American again and by then we'll have established suppliers outside. If American companies are willing to operate in Euros instead and therefore assuming the fiscal risks themselves, we may reconsider, but this would likely hurt them and then we are worried about the health of the companies we're committing to.
Since Trump came in, the DHS and Treasury has made it particularly difficult to invoice American companies. If we can't sell to the US, we can't buy from the US. This means that we need to be able to rent people and equipment to the US. As a company attempting to invoice a US company, it is required to fill out tax forms that provide information to prove that you're not laundering money. This is because the US doesn't trust their own companies or foreign companies to operate fairly. If you refuse to or are simply unable to fill out these forms, the American company is required to withhold 30% of your payment and pay it to the US government instead. This may sound like no big deal, but to properly fill out these forms requires that you're invoicing at least $25,000 to justify the cost of employing an international tax lawyer to handle the process. So, the solution is to open a shell corporation in the US, then buy bonds in Apple and then take a loan from Apple in Europe... which in turn is money laundering. But it's legal money laundering.
I'd be remiss if I didn't explain that we always had to file these forms in the past as well. It's simply that with the added trade restrictions since Trump took over, it's much worse. The form used to be something you could fill out yourself. Now it requires actual accountants and tax attorneys.
Now, let me approach the specific topic at hand.
IP Theft.
The Chinese have now declared that there are lots of possible punishments for IP theft. This is a big issue.
1) The commitment doesn't define what IP theft means. It doesn't state whether US patents are recognized in the consideration.
2) It doesn't declare how IP theft is identified. Is it something that is reported? Is it something they have to discover themselves?
3) It doesn't specify where the burden of proof lies. Is this a guilty until proven innocent or vise versa environment?
4) It doesn't specify whether IP theft claims can be filed remotely.
5) It doesn't specify whether simply making something similar is actually IP theft
I can go on. It basically says "We will treat IP theft badly" but what's more important is that China recognizes less than 1% of all claims made regarding IP theft as actually being IP theft. It's not like you can just say "China stole my thing". There's been a rough total of 2 big cases ever filed regarding IP the
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You make a good point - IP in the US is pretty much any thought you've ever had. Even Europe doesn't respect that level of craziness, and demands a bit more 'weight' before it's something they'd consider 'IP'. China will, as you say, only consider something 'IP' if it benefits China. If not, it's probably fair game and can be copied, stolen, undercut or whatever else with impunity.
That said, if you do find yourself on the wrong end of one of these punishments, I doubt it'll end well for you.
China Announces Punishments For Intellectual-Prope (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No country truly benefits from IP. All it is, especially the forever minus X days/minutes/seconds kind, the restriction of reuse without any benefit to society as a whole. The best argument those that support it can come up with is "It allows recoup of development costs." for an actual reason and "No-one else would do it otherwise" as a an excuse.
The problem with the former is most costs, especially in the patent arena, are paid for by public funds. For copyright, the costs are entirely based on the scope o
Re:China Announces Punishments For Intellectual-Pr (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I never said it wasn't. I said the work done can fit the available budget. The idea that someone needs to spend more money than they have to make a work of art is ridiculous. For things like medical / basic scientific research that's something that taxes pay for. Doing anything has a cost. That is also a fundamental rule of the universe. (It's called Thermodynamics, and Conservation of Energy
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Because it is mentally easier to rail against artists who are seen as "non-/. readers" than IP issues which actually DO affect /. users.
After all, without IP protections, the precious GPL is worthless, and that's not something that can be contemplated when railing against IP. Easier to rail against artists and musicians and the l
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I never said it wasn't. I said the work done can fit the available budget. The idea that someone needs to spend more money than they have to make a work of art is ridiculous. For things like medical / basic scientific research that's something that taxes pay for. Doing anything has a cost. That is also a fundamental rule of the universe. (It's called Thermodynamics, and Conservation of Energy and Mass.)
I never said anything about religion. You're the one bringing God into this.
Also, demanding that others pay artists for the ability to even *think* about something in perpetuity, despite them never needing to contribute anything again, isn't what I would call a "stable economy." Especially when they expect that they can have their imaginary property "generate" royalties for just as long out of thin air. I would consider that to be a very "self-important" and "overbearing" demand to place on others. The cost doesn't justify the result, and the further we get away from the street date, the more constrained society's overall source material gets. Eventually artists lock up everything and people can't create anything without an army of lawyers and the funds to pay them. Since so few people have that kind of money, many people will simply avoid creating anything for fear of going bankrupt and society as a whole is worse off as a result of the creative chilling effect.
You didn't read a damn thing did you?
Number one: No, an artist's magnum opus is not worth making themselves bankrupt. If they can't afford to create something without bankrupting themselves in the process, and yes I'm including their profits after taking into account the piracy that will inevitably happen because universe fundamentals, then they shouldn't make it. Period. Full stop. The rest of society is expected to live within their means, artists can too.
Number two: Creating a system that only serves to bankrupt society so artists can make that latest work of "art" is not only ill-advised, but much like the artificial copy restrictions, such a system goes against the laws of the universe. Under such a system, eventually it won't matter how much money artists have. The reason being that eventually artists will use up all of the available supplies and won't be able to create anything else afterwards. Of course I'd imagine we'd see an uprising or two from society long before their resource consumption got to that point.
Number three: The things we have to make we will assuming the resources are there to do it. If there isn't enough available resources, then we'll "recycle" stuff until there is or we realize we can't do it with what we have. Remember the financial incentive was just that an incentive. Before the financial incentive was put in place it was often the case artists didn't make money off of their work, and in some cases "their" work was made in exchange for being fed / allowed to live. Normally they could only work with the materials given to them, had to "adjust" the work to please the contractor, and lost ownership of the work as it was always considered to be "a work for hire." Would artists prefer we bring back those terms considering they apparently need help with resource management?
If you can't do basic financials, and account for that piracy in the overall investment vs. potential profit, then you deserve to go bankrupt. No other industry in all of human history has ever done anything without also accounting for potential losses. Whether it's theft, sabotage, acts of god / nature, or unforeseen consequences, no other industry would expect and require 100% profit to break even when submitting a project proposal with the expectation that said proposal would be approved. Learn to account for pirates, and other issues, in your development budget and maybe you wouldn't have such dire financial circumstances.
That's reality for you, and depending on where the artist lives in the world compared to the person using their work, the work may be subject to that very fact. A lot of Westerners have had similar experiences with the Chinese....
Research has shown multiple times that most people are generally willing to pay even when they can get it for free, if it's convenient enough for them to do so. Case in point: Amazon MP3s, iTunes, and Steam. People will even accept the restrictions if it's easier. Granted there are some that will never pay a cent, but those are the people the artist would have never convinced to pay anyway and should have accounted for when they made their project budget like everyone else.
They could also make more works, rather than leech off of their previous works. I thought they wanted to make works for a living? Making enough works, within your means, and consistently ending up in the black is the whole point of their chosen career. If that's too much for them, they can always choose a new career path.
And in case you still have missed the point: Artists are not worth destroying our economy over by giving them special privilege to ignore economics. Artists need to create their works within their means, and if they are unwilling to do that, then the world is better off without them and their art. We don't need to bankrupt ourselves to please an artist's creative ego.
Reading your post is pretty tiring, you sound like one of those damn politicians who delivers long speeches that basically say nothing of real substance. You ramble on about intelligence, being baked into the universe at a very fundamental level which is true, but then so is the need for life forms to sustain themselves. So one more time, can you come up with an alternate model by which IP creators (including the ones who aren't artists) can sustain themselves in your perfect world where piracy is the norm?
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You mean like the East Texas court massively favours US companies over everyone else?
Or how the USPO does only the most cursory, minimal check for prior art or obviousness before granting patents on rounded corners?
Let's face it, IP laws and enforcement are screwed up all over and every country abuses them for its own benefit.
Communist China doesn't care about IP theft (Score:2)
They never have. There is fake Chicom stuff everywhere in China, fake Apple stores, etc.
Re:Communist China doesn't care about IP theft (Score:4, Informative)
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. [foreignpolicy.com]
This is not an excuse, not saying China's theft should be ignored. Just adding some context.
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By some accounts this is because the enforcement of IP is usually local, and you have to butter-up/bribe the local officials for them to act. While loyalty to country may play a part, loyalty to money is usually greater.
However, punishment for bribery may be heavier for employees of foreign companies.
What?? This'll never work! (Score:1)
Most Chinese people can't even pronounce "intellectual"! This smacks of white supremacy!
Let me know when they actually enforce this (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Hundreds? You don't seem to appreciate the large scale of "China" or the small scale of what a "factory" is there.
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If you hadn't noticed China has actually clamped down on the blatant fakes. You used to be able to go to somewhere like the Shenzhen clothes markets and buy fake Prada, fake Louis Vitton, fake Burberry stuff. Now that's mostly gone, you only see stuff that looks similar but lacks the logo or Chinese brands that are now establishing themselves.
Of course copying styles is the norm in the fashion industry. And "fake" stuff is normal too, e.g. Superdry is a London based company and all the Japanese writing on t
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They obviously aren't going far enough when companies like Lepin are still making products that are not only a direct clone of the latest LEGO sets but in any number of cases rip off 3rd party IP like Star Wars or Super Heroes or Voltron.
Who gets to decide? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I really don't want to be the person defending China, but they have every right to determine such things for themselves.
After all, it would be unjust to flip the situation around and expect US courts to be subject to Chinese rulings. The unfortunate reality arrives where China, being China, will selectively enforce such laws to support Chinese businesses over foreign ones and, most likely, they will a
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This is precisely what happens with Western courts.
You get a judgement against a US firm, in a UK or Canadian court. You then register that judgement in a US court. You then use the court appointed representative to seize assets, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcement_of_foreign_judgments
Local courts will obviously examine the claim, but current legislation and case history says that -- yes, I can sue a US firm in the UK, win, then register + collect in the US.
This is the only way to really handle
Intellectuals (Score:2)
Intellectuals understand that the words they speak aren't properly, and can't be stolen via theft.
Catch 22 for engineers (Score:5, Interesting)
Your grandma may have told you: be careful what you wish for.
1. If the claim of Chinese intellectual property violation is not exaggerated [stanford.edu] 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 [wipo.int]. 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 [stanford.edu]. (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.)
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For sure, I will not rename myself to Dick Cheney and scam your money by exaggerating threats (of Iraq WMD.) You can contribute to coffer of him and other US politicians by believing whatever they have told you.
Re: Catch 22 for engineers (Score:2)
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3. once China enforce harder, their hi-tech industry will only become more competitive.
My logic might not be the same as yours. In game theory, you are always more competitive if you don't waste energy on enforcement. As far as I understand a patent is a legally enforced monopoly on something, that's pretty much the opposite of being competitive.
It's using the legal system to cheat your way out of having to compete. It does give you an advantage over would-be competitors but it doesn't make you more competitive. If the ref had the power to decide that only one of the basketball teams is a
Social credit go down (Score:2)
Incoming Trade Deal (Score:2)
huh? this is what that country DOES (Score:1)
This is the pot calling the kettle black.