Yesterday the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) talks seems to have been pretty fruitful and some concrete measures were announced:
- China will open offices in 50 cities to handle piracy complaints and to raise awareness about intellectual property;
- China pledged to close Chinese optical disk plants that are producing pirated CDs and DVDs (China has committed to conducting seven special enforcement operations against IP pirates, read here.
Commerce Minister Bo Xilai says the government is working hard to fight piracy and rejects suggestions that China’s copyright infringements were causing a growing trade surplus. Bo says he thinks it is more likely that US restrictions on high-technology exports, rather than intellectual property infringement, influenced the trade surplus.”
Read Daniel Schearf’s article for Voice of America here.
Good news for software producers
“New regulations state Chinese computer makers must install legally licensed operating software on machines before they leave the factory.“ The measure was announced by China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII), the State Copyright Bureau and the Ministry of Commerce. Read the BBC News article here.
Berkeley
Yesterday, also the University of California, Berkeley and a Chinese delegation announced they will start a joint education programme about intellectual property rights.
“…20 Chinese will attend classes at Berkeley and get hands-on training as interns’ at Bay Area law firms and U.S. courts. Preliminary plans call for instructors from UC-Berkeley to conduct larger training seminars in China in 2007.“
Read K. Oanh Ha’s article for Mercury News here.
