Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

Since 1990s, every April has been a month of “war of words” between the USA and China on IPR disputes. In these years, angry rhetoric of discontent could be heard from both parties. But either party had ever meant business. They either commenced a new round of negotiation or threatened to each other with trade sanctions. Eventually, the disputes would end up in compromise. This year is different. USA filed the complaint against China to the WTO, specifically alleging China for ineffective IPR enforcement and restriction of importation of American culture products. Chinese government has declared that the US’s action will seriously damage the trade relationship between the two countries. The disputes, in the WTO dispute settlement procedure, is in 60-day of negotiation period. If no agreement cannot be reached, the disputes would have to be decided by a panel.

http://finance.sina.com.cn/j/20070410/14093488196.shtml

China used the first provision of the TRIPS to defend itself.

http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2007-06-09/182613191693.shtml

60-day negotiation period expired, no agreement was reached. On August 31, US applied to set up a panel to solve the dispute. The Panel might be set up in October 2007.

http://finance.sina.com.cn/j/20070831/05143934387.shtml

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

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

Although Pfizer won several cases in the Chinese courts against pirate products of Viagra, it lost recently over Viagra’s Chinese transliteration “Wei Ge” (meaning “a big brother”).

Beijing First Intermediary People’s Court upheld a lower court ruling and ordered Beijing Health New Concept Pharmacy Company and Lianhuan Pharmaceutical Company to stop making their little blue pills and ordered Lianhuan to pay Pfizer 300,000 yuan ($38,000) in damages.

In contrast, Pfizer has filed an appeal after losing a lawsuit over the Chinese name “Wei Ge” for its impotence treatment Viagra.

http://english.cri.cn/3130/2007/02/05/262@192838.htm