Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

The case took five years but just ended in a landmark decision by the Supreme People’s Court in China awarding Yahama Motor $1.1 million, the highest amount of damages ever awarded in China in a trademark dispute involving a foreign company.

The Chinese company….registered a shell company in Japan’s remote Ishikawa prefecture in 2000 under the same three characters used by Yamaha to render its name in Chinese. This Japanese shell company then signed a licensing agreement with Zhejiang Huatian, allowing it to market its scooters in China under that name. Zhejiang Huatian went a step further by printing Yamaha’s name in English letters on its scooters.

http://www.chinalawblog.com/chinalawblog/2007/06/china_court_kil.html

Proposals to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet , specifically China, were rejected by Yahoo shareholders.

Last year, Human Rights Watch, a New York based campaign group, accused Yahoo, Google and Microsoft for “carrying out censorship for the Chinese government”.

Neither Yahoo nor any other company has released a list of websites that have been de-listed for their political and religious content.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6747095.stm

After promulgation of the Property Law, the draft of the Torts Law has been published. Protection of privacy will be formally established.

http://news.sina.com.cn/c/l/2007-06-12/065213207904.shtml

A Hong Kong man convicted of sharing pirated movies lost his final appeal on Friday in the territory’s highest court and will now have to finish serving a three-month prison sentence.

The court of final appeal held, “He plainly succeeded in distributing copies of the films in question,” the court said in its judgment. “The appeal must accordingly be dismissed.”

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/05/18/tech-bittorrent-hongkong.html#skip300x250

In May, Symantec antivirus program wrongly identified two system files in Windows XP Chinese version as Trojan and paralyzed the users’ system by removing these files. Some Chinese users have filed complaints against Norton and sought for compensation.

However, network security experts in China have already suspected that Symantec got it right that these two files are indeed intentionally-installed backdoor by Microsoft to spoof the Chinese computer system.

http://www.fengnews.com/article/2007/0524/news_5489.html