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Friday, April 14, 2006
Ng: Intellectual property issues
By WILSON NG
Wired Desktop
HOT. One of the most hotly debated issues, I think, not only among the technology world, but I guess all over the business world is intellectual property. Intellectual property goes beyond just software—it is also about protecting music, movies, patents and brand names.
Fake merchandise is, according to many estimates, an almost $500-billion business, and no country, I guess, is more notorious about it than China. In the computer industry alone, there are fake digital video and compact discs, ink cartridges, USB drives, game cartridges, mp3 players, memory modules and Microsoft and other software licenses—all engineered to look like the original.
I was just reading a book called “China Inc., How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World” by Ted Fishman. For all you know, fake copies of this book, including Chinese translated ones are also sold in China. He enumerated some of the pirated goods that you can buy in China. Practically, for everything that can be made and sold, a copy can exist.
He documented cases of fake Budweiser and Heineken Beer, Coke, Starbucks, Rejoice Shampoos, Cisco and 3com networking equipment, cigarettes, tires and batteries. Of course, famous designed merchandise, like Tommy Hilfiger, Lacoste, Hugo Boss, Armani and others are even more plentiful. But it goes beyond that.
According to Fishman, over half of Gucci and Versace eyewears and licenses sold in Guangzhou are fakes, and 80 percent of them were substandard and put the condition of the users’ eyes at risk. There are also fake auto parts, motorcycle parts, insecticides, medicines, toiletries, pens, golf clubs and even soy sauce.
In the local front, we were advised about fake noodles and canned goods. Of course, when you go to China, fake Rolex timepieces or any Swiss watches of your choice are sold in almost every tourist stop.
He estimates that over 90 percent of the items sold in such famous shopping centers like Huai Hai Road in Shanghai, or Silk Alley of Beijing are bogus merchandise.
He documented even funny issues of this. In 1998, the US trade administrator, who was in charge of negotiating trade policies apparently went back to the US after a negotiation agreement and was found entering the country with forty fake Beanie Baby stuffed animals. In August 2004, Italy’s foreign minister caused a flap when he brought back a fake Rolex he bought while in Beijing.
There are also some celebrated outright issues on copyright. Toyota sued a company called Geely for outrightly using Toyota’s logo in one of its cars. The manufacturers made a defense that they did not recognize Toyota’s logo. Huawei earlier had an issue when its router and switches were designed much like Cisco equipment, and it purposely uses the same computer code. The issue has since been settled.
Starbucks recently won a case for a China chain, which sells coffee and uses the XingBake trade name. Xing is the Chinese translation of Star, and “bake,” of course, sounds like bucks.
The latest to hit the newsstands today is the report that China Unicom, China’s second largest mobile service operator, just launched a push e-mail system that is named RedBerry. If you note, this is a brazen attempt to capitalize and probably benefit from the worldwide brand name of BlackBerry of Research in Motion Ltd., the pioneer and leader in push email systems in mobile devices.
It is said that these attitudes are cultural in nature. If you note, Chinese scholars are prized and rewarded for their ability to memorize and quote the classics, and the more they famous phrases they can quote, the more learned and sophisticated they sound. Of course, the Western culture prizes originality and creativity, and he who keeps quoting earlier works is said to be plagiarizing.
China will copy now because they don’t own most of the technology. And apparently the government is not too keen to police it stringently especially if it sees its citizens are benefiting from it. But it was noted that Hero, one of the Chinese movie blockbusters that starred Jet Li, and produced by the Chinese studios was hardly pirated in China, and I think we all know why.
But there will come a point when the economy develops and many Chinese companies will now own the patents and trade names. It will be interesting to see China trying to work out the intellectual property issues.
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In my last article, "Apple's Steve Jobs" on April 6, 2006, I failed to properly credit Mr. Owen Linzmayer of Wired News, whose article I liberally quoted. Mr. Linzmayer's original article, "Apple's Finest Flip-Flops", appears in the Wired News website.
*******
Wilson Ng keeps a log of his articles in (www.bizdrivenlife.net)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (April 13, 2006 issue)
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