Feng Tao of Xinhua reports the item communicated by the Ministry of Public Security that the PSB dealt with 4,600 cases of counterfeit and inferior products between January and November 2006. Police arrested more than 5,000 people. The question unanswered in this article is how many of them got prosecuted, and of those, how many got fined or a prison sentence?
Feng also wrote about Qiqihar No. 2 Pharmaceutical Co., that manufactured tainted durgs that killed 11 people in Guangdong province, in May 2006, due to acute kidney failure. Read more here.
China Radio International runs with the Xinhua story that China seized 9.06 billion counterfeit brand cigarettes, another product that kills, counterfeit or not. Law enforcement agencies arrested 6,334 people with 2,313 prosecuted, said administration spokesperson Zhang Xiulian of China’s State Tobacco Monopoly Administration. Read more here. Again, how many of them got fined or a prison sentence?
Then again these cases may not have been brought before a judge, yet.
A related question is: do more litigations, have any result?
I wrote about it in the article: More IPR Ligitation in China is Nice, But What About The Enforcement Ratio.
In short: more litigations do not necessarily mean that infringements are on their way back. In that article I point to an objective way of measuring the impact litigations have on infringements, by using foreign customs to gather information about the number of infringements. This implies, however, that when customs improve their investigation system, like the US Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did, read here, the number of infringements from one year to the next should be adjusted.
