Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

Technological-neutral or not? This is a question.

When the MII is going to issue the 3G licenses, some Chinese experts warn the government that so-call technological-neutrality principle will only consolidate the existing technical advantage and patent monopoly of the international giants. China needs to give the favorite treatment to her domestically based TD-SCDMA standard.
http://tech.sina.com.cn/t/2006-12-26/03121305968.shtml

Another Chinese standard that is going to be implemented is the uniformity of mobile phone chargers of different brands. From June 14, 2007, the standard is put into implementation.
http://tech.sina.com.cn/t/2007-01-18/00121340744.shtml; http://tech.sina.com.cn/focus/sjcdqhybz/index.shtml

Different voice can be heard as well. Discrimination against foreign companies is not consistent with the WTO commitment.
http://tech.sina.com.cn/t/2007-01-12/15171333215.shtml

Ironically, the recent developments of the digital TV standard demonstrate that there is no neutrality but commercial interests in the western standard choice and deployment. The new patent addition to the standard will force Chinese TV exporters to pay US$20 more to the patent owners.
http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2006-12-26/00321305773.shtml

To make things worse, EU is forming another patent pool for digital TV.
See http://tech.sina.com.cn/e/2007-01-13/08051333820.shtml

MII has announced the Chinese national standards (AVS video and audio) developed by domestic enterprises.
http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2007-01-21/07061345493.shtml

Beijing First Intermediary Court ruled that Baidu’s service of posting links to sites offering illegal music was not infringing the recording companies’ copyright as the music was downloaded from web servers of third parties, not from Baidu.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6163352.stm

The decision is available at: http://yuguofu.blog.sohu.com/28551641.html

Two Tigers’ Fight

There can only be one winner out of the two-tiger fight. In the dispute between Yahoo! (Chinese transliterated as an “elegant tiger”) and Qihu (meaning a “magical tiger”), a tiger just won at the first instance court but another tiger swears to appeal to fight to the very end. They are fighting over whether a plug-in program “Yahoo Assistant” developed by Yahoo! China should be classified as hooligan software by Qihu’s program. Given that the CEO of Qihu used to the CEO of Yahoo! China and had actually developed the original version of Yahoo Assistant, the legal dispute was colored by the war of words as “who is the real hooligan”.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2006-12-20/20261298538.shtml

Kaspersky versus Ruixing

Anti-hooligan fighting has entered into antivirus software field. Ruixing, a leading domestic antivirus software developer, was just sued by Kaspersky at Tian Jin First Intermediate People’s Court. In May, Ruixing furiously condemned Kaspersky on various media for labelling and deleting its anti-hooligan software “Kaka Online Assistant”. Kaspersbky is now suing Ruixing for defamation.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2007-07-02/15141593714.shtml

At the critical time of releasing 3G standard (TD-SCDMA), the Minister of Information Industry warned Qualcomm that they should not even consider charging 10%-20% of the whole 3G sale revenue as the patent fees. So far, Qualcomm has been silence on the China’s announcement that Chinese enterprise–DaTang–has the independent intellectual property rights over the new standard.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/t/2006-12-21/03111298838.shtml

Different from the normal affirmative and even supporting attitude toward the enactment of a new legislation, Chinese governmental media seems unanimously denouncing both the effectiveness and the motive of the new Online Music Regulations that were just released by the Ministry of Culture. It’s a signal that the media that is keen of exploring the online chance is fed up with the regulations matrix on the Internet.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/art/2006/12/18/300138/Online_music_regulation_questioned.htm