Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

A few days after Google released its pinyin input method for Chinese characters to reinforce its market penetration in China, Sohu, a leading ICT as well as a competing search engine provider, accused Google for copying its own Chinese character database and integrating it into Google’s input method. Google acknowledged that it did use the “other sources” in its character database in the phase of test and apologized to the users. Google also announced that all these sources have been removed from the database. This incidence is likely to damage Google’s market image of being innovative and non-evil.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/focus/sg_pinyin/index.shtml

Google’s response is at:
http://tech.sina.com.cn/focus/sg_pinyin/index.shtml

Chinese government is tightening the control of the Internet content. One of the measures is the Opinions on Development and Administration of Internet Music, which was published by the Ministry of Culture in December 2006. One of the principles set out by this document is to promote domestic music and creative industries.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2006-12-11/17481282518.shtml;

http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2006-12-12/065111763951.shtm

Chinese enterprises are going overseas, so are the litigation against them. Imitation of foreign designs, brands or technologies might be a good starting-up strategy but it could become a time bomb once globalizing the business.

A couple of digital products of Chinese companies were seized at Hanover’s CeBIT2007 for patent infringement. A leading MP3 producer, Huaqi, complained that it did pay patent licensing fee for the chips and should not be charging for using the chips on products. MII has published a report to alert the domestic manufactures of intellectual property risk in the international market. A index of key technologies and important products under the independent intellectual property rights of China’s information industry has been released as a component of the national intellectual property strategy.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2007-04-04/02071447415.shtml

http://tech.sina.com.cn/focus/07_CeBIT_MP3/index.shtml

Another group of German businesses are watching the Chinese competitors. Both BMW and DaimlerChrysler have sued or plan to sue the alleged copies by Chinese automakers that are entering into German market.
http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/51/09-12-2007/4a93001192274c0a.html

MII is going to publish another ICT technical standard, which is on the searching technology of text messages via mobile phones. On the basis of domain name system, the new technology moves the Internet naming and locating technology onto the mobile network. It is not clear whether the new governmental standard is exactly the one developed by the MobNIC, the associate of mobile operators (Unicom and China Mobile).

http://msn.ynet.com/view.jsp?oid=19644081

Following the action of the State Administration of Broadcasts, Movies and Television against online piracy, the NACA is taking measures to punish transmission of pirate movies and television series through peer-to-peer websites.

One leading resource congregation site “Xunlei” is now feeling the pressure to filtering illegal (such as pornographic videos) and pirate contents from its system.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2007-03-17/00481420875.shtml