Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

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

Chinese domain names market has always been active. Ten of thousands of “corn worms” are registering and selling domain names every days. The Chinese translation for domain names sounds like “corns”, so the traders of domain names are called “corn worms”.

Recently, the CNNIC launched a “One RMB Yuan per CN Domain Name” campaign to compete with the domain names registered under gTLDs, particularly “.com”. The campaign seems effective for registration volume of CN domain leaps to 1.8 million. Comparing with 1.94 million “.com” domain names, CN domain names are catching up very quickly.

However, individuals are still not eligible to register CN domain names under the Registration Policy. As a result, individuals have to use the registrars as their proxies. Many disputes are caused by such unclear and undefined agency relationship.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2007-03-17/01321420915.shtml;

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2007-03-17/01311420913.shtml

Represented by two lovable penguins, Tengxun’s QQ is more than the most successful instant communication tool but a series of network services (chat, community and games).

QQ Coins are sold online. You may think they are simply tokens for visual games or alternative payment for QQ services, but when they’ve reached the amount of RMB 220 million, they acquired sorts of quasi currency status among the QQ users. QQ coins may well imply the financial risk to Chinese currency system.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2007-03-09/07161408016.shtml

Regulation is actually coming up.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2007-06-12/04161557194.shtml