China’s parliament on Saturday passed a revised patent law that will permit inventors to seek patents in other countries before obtaining them domestically, opening the door to more filings by Chinese firms overseas.

The amended law, which will take effect on Oct. 1 next year, aims to encourage innovation and improve China’s international competitiveness, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Currently, the law requires that those who come up with inventions in China must apply for domestic patents before applying for them in another country.

However, the amendment stipulates that before they can apply for patents overseas, inventors must first have their innovations vetted by the government to determine whether they should be made “national secrets”, Xinhua said.

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Washington yesterday announced a new initiative at the World Trade Organisation to bring Beijing to heel over “rampant” copyright abuses.

Backed by Japan and Switzerland, the office of US Trade Representative Rob Portman said it had launched a special WTO process to obtain information on China’s protection of intellectual property rights.

“The United States is deeply concerned by the violations of intellectual property rights in China,” Mr Portman said in the statement. “The development of intellectual property is one of the driving forces of US economic competitiveness, and we will utilise all tools at our disposal to ensure that US intellectual property rights are protected.

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At present, rates of music piracy are high throughout China’s audio-visual industries. Music industry executives generally quote piracy rates of between 75% and 95%. Disc piracy is common, particularly in wealthier cities along China’s eastern seaboard. People living in less affluent or developed areas still use pirated audio cassettes, which are cheaper to copy than digital media. Cassette players, which are capable of both playing and copying music, are much more affordable to people living in poor areas of China than computers. They are also easier for less educated sectors of the population to use: they do not require computer literacy or the ability to Romanise Chinese characters (pin yin). Expensive hardware investments are also unnecessary, allowing anyone with a tape recorder and a blank cassette to copy and share music using this format, regardless of their access to the internet.

At the same time, the development of an extensive broadband network in China’s cities and growing levels of PC ownership among the emerging urban elite are also resulting in high levels of music downloading. MP3 downloading is particularly common among university students and young professionals, who are more likely than other sectors of China’s population to have access to the Internet, an interest in music and the skills to engage in this activity.

Thanks to Philipp Bohn for providing this link.

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New problems come and go between China and the United States, but when leaders of the two countries meet in Washington shortly, protection of intellectual property will be on the agenda – as it has been for years.

Joining DVD’s and cheap knockoffs of brand-name clothing and computer software are new, upscale lines of counterfeit goods. Shoppers can find “Callaway Big Bertha” golf clubs, and “Ikea” furniture. Shanghai bar and nightclub operators say they are often sold fake bottles of Chivas Regal or Johnnie Walker Scotch, which are slipped in among bottles of the genuine item in the cases they buy from wholesalers. Pharmacies and drug makers say copies of Western medicines – far beyond just Viagra clones – are common. Garages say fake auto parts are widespread.

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As part of a drive to both improve the rule of law and encourage entrepreneurship, China is seeking to improve its patent regulations. For Chinese inventors, patents both in China and abroad mean increased revenue and access to new markets. Unfortunately, despite the many efforts that Chinese innovators are making to protect their creations against intellectual property theft, the terms of domestic patents remain sufficiently loose as to allow for imitations of copyrighted inventions, which are subsequently exported. China’s weak patent protection system is rooted in both the historical Chinese conception of intellectual property as a common good, and in the government lackadaisical approach to protecting individual innovations. Experts say that the evolution of intellectual property law is unlikely to lead to an American- or European-style system. Perhaps the realization that Chinese firms are suffering as much as their foreign competitors from counterfeiting and toothless patents will be an incentive for the government to strengthen its laws. – YaleGlobal

Technorati Tags: China, Copyrights

Technorati Tags: China, copyrights

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A large number of China’s colleges and universities are unaware of their intellectual property rights, according to a recent survey.

The survey, conducted by the Zhejiang Polytechnic University at the request of the State Intellectual Property Office, shows that 75 percent of China’s colleges and universities have never or have applied for very few patent rights in the past five years…

The survey shows that nearly 30 percent of research achievements made by Chinese colleges and universities have lost as a result of lacking patent protection. Some of the research results have been stolen and some have gone with researchers when they changed jobs, said Yuan, who is one of the directors of the survey team.

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Each shift, 200 workers, most of them women in smocks and bibs, labor in a factory tucked away in hilly farmland outside this city assembling a single product, one-inch hard drives.

As China’s emerging industrial centers go, Guiyang is an obscure outpost, bearing little resemblance to the booming factory towns of the east coast. And yet, as much as any other place in China this hard drive assembly may be at the front line of an intense global struggle to dominate high-tech manufacturing.

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But the information on the discs – the new ideas and creativity – mostly come from the US, Japan, or Europe. Buy one and you’re an accomplice to theft on a global scale.

Intellectual property rights are about as honored in China as human rights are. One difference is that Western and Japanese companies lose an estimated $80 billion a year because of China’s infringement on patents and copyrights through piracy and counterfeiting.”

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At a time when design activities in the mainland are doubling every year and territory’s fab capacity is going through a hyper growth period, protection of IP related to IC design and process seems a genuine concern.

The good news is that a new mindset that calls for a greater awareness of IP rights is emerging in China’s tech elite. A new breed of VC-backed companies like IPCore Technologies has started setting IP-protection benchmarks in the region.”

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“China is home to a tangle of IP issues, with large sums of money and future strategic positions at stake,” says the report, Facing the China Challenge, by BCG consultants David Michael, based in Beijing and Kevin Rivette, in San Francisco. ”

Read the full article on Globe and Mail here.

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