US put India in "priority watch list"

India, China, Russia and nine other nations have been targeted by the United States for failing to sufficiently protect American producers of music, movies and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.

The Bush administration on Monday placed the 12 countries on a "priority watch list", which will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions if the administration decides to bring trade cases before the World Trade Organization.

Another 31 countries were placed on lower level monitoring lists, indicating the concerns about copyright violations in those nations did not warrant the highest level of scrutiny.



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U.S. groups say Chinese product piracy rising

The flood of pirated movies and other goods from China is growing despite increased enforcement, two U.S. business groups said Thursday, appealing to Beijing for tougher action.
Beijing's anti-piracy activity "is either not enough or not of the right kind," the American Chamber of Commerce in China and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said in a report released on International Intellectual Property Day.

Forty percent of companies surveyed said the volume of counterfeiting of their products in China increased, while only 4 percent saw a decline, said the report, an annual review of Chinese business conditions.

Chinese product piracy has worsened tensions with Washington, which filed a World Trade Organization complaint this month accusing Beijing of violating trade commitments by failing to protect copyrights, patents and other intellectual property rights.

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Canada asks to join WTO talks on China piracy

WASHINGTON - Complaining that it, too, is a victim of Chinese piracy, Canada wants to join the United States in complaining about Beijing's lax enforcement of copyright and intellectual property rights.

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Microsoft's China sales up 20%

Software giant Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it expects its China sales to rise more than 20 percent this year, boosted by new products and a national crackdown on software piracy.

Responding to complaints by Western governments and companies, as well as criticism from a growing number of domestic firms, China has been clamping down on piracy over the last two years to the benefit of software makers such as Microsoft (Charts).

Weak copyright laws in China make it hard to enforce the issue. CNN's John Vause reports. (April 9)

As part of the campaign, most of the nation's top domestic PC sellers, including Lenovo and Founder, have pushed to boost their number of PCs sold with legal copies of Microsoft's Windows operating systems already installed.

Other major foreign players in the market, including global leaders Hewlett-Packard (Charts) and Dell (Charts), are pushing similar policies in China.

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US throws the book at China over piracy

The US government yesterday announced its intention to file two legal complaints with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against China to stem the high levels of piracy there and tackle limited market access.

US trade representative Susan Schwab said that insufficient protection for intellectual property rights in China has led to losses of billions in sales for US software, music and film companies.

The US government estimates that piracy costs its economy between US$200bn and US$250bn a year, with up to US$24bn lost alone from sales of pirated goods in China.

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Retrial for Microsoft piracy case

A Russian court has ordered a retrial of a case against a rural head teacher accused of using pirated Microsoft software in his school.
Last month a lower court in Perm, some 1,000km (620 miles) east of Moscow, dismissed the case as "trivial".

But a higher court has ruled it should proceed against Alexander Ponosov after pressure from the prosecution.

The trial has been seen as a response to international pressure to crack down on piracy in Russia.

Industry experts say Russia ranks second only to China in use of illegal computer software and bootlegged music.

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1.6 million pirated DVDs seized

HONG KONG

Chinese officials seized 1.6 million illegal DVDs in southern China in the country's largest anti-piracy haul of the year, a film industry group said Monday.

The midnight raid on the DVD factory and storage center in the city of Guangzhou turned up pirated versions of Chinese, American, Korean and Japanese movies and TV shows, according to the Motion Picture Association, which said it tipped off the authorities.

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U.S. movie studios win piracy case in China court

BEIJING: Five U.S. movie studios have won a court case against a Beijing shop accused of selling pirated copies of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and "War of the Worlds" and other titles, the Motion Picture Association said Tuesday.

The Beijing No.2 Intermediate People's Court ruled the Yu Hao Qing DVD store and its parent company, Beijing Century Hai Hong Trading Co. Ltd, were guilty of copyright infringement and ordered them to stop selling pirated moves and pay 164,000 yuan (US$20,100; €15,300) in compensation.

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Microsoft moves to block hybrid Vista

The software maker said on Thursday that the update is aimed at thwarting a technique that was letting some people use pirated versions of the operating system without going through the software's built-in product activation. Microsoft has dubbed the approach "frankenbuild" because it works by combining test versions of Vista with the final code to create a hybrid version.

"Windows Vista will use the new Windows Update client to require only the 'frankenbuild' systems to go through a genuine validation check," Microsoft said on its Windows Genuine Advantage program blog. "These systems will fail that check because we have blocked the [product] keys for systems not authorised to use them."

Although Vista was only released to businesses last month ? and won't hit retail shelves until late January ? it has been making the rounds on the internet, and there have been several reported hacks to bypass its built-in security mechanisms.

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China signs Web piracy deal with U.S. movie group

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Friday agreed with the Motion Picture Association of America and other groups to do more to tackle copyright piracy on the Internet, the official Xinhua news agency said. China's National Copyright Administration said the country would investigate and punish those suspected of online intellectual property abuses by the movie association as well as other groups such as the Association of American Publishers.
The Chinese and foreign sides would also keep in close touch with each other and exchange information, Xinhua said.
The Business Software Alliance and Britain's Publishers Association were two other groups that signed the agreement, it added.
Piracy is one of the trade issues that has poisoned trade relations between China and the United States, and has been a focus of two days of talks in Beijing, led on the U.S. side by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

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China announces anti-piracy crackdown

BEIJING

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confronted mixed signals as he arrived in China Wednesday for trade talks, with Beijing announcing a renewed crackdown on pirated goods but also running up a record trade surplus with the United States.

American officials are trying to downplay expectations of breakthroughs from the talks led by Paulson, Washington's point man on economic ties with Beijing, and Chinese Premier Wu Yi. The talks are billed as the start of a wide-ranging "strategic economic dialogue."

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Music Piracy Crackdown Targets Seventeen Countries

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has launched more than 8,000 legal cases against illegal music downloaders across 17 countries in recent weeks. "Consumers today can get music legally in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago ... yet some people continue to consume their music illegally," said IFPI chairman John Kennedy.

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Vietnam fines South Korean Daewoo's affiliate for software piracy

HANOI, Vietnam Authorities in Vietnam have fined an affiliate of South Korea's Daewoo Corp. for using pirated software, the first time a corporate user of illegal software has been targeted in the Southeast Asian country, officials said Wednesday.

Police and inspectors from the Ministry of Culture and Information raided the Hanoi-based Daewoo Hanel Electronic Corp., last week and discovered all the software installed in their computers was pirated, said Vu Xuan Thanh, the ministry's chief inspector.

The illegal software included copies of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Auto CAD, Thanh said.

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EU says China main focus of new anti-piracy push

BRUSSELS: China will be the main focus of new efforts by the European Union to crack down on intellectual property violations as it accounts for two thirds of pirated goods entering the bloc, the EU’s Commission said on Thursday.

“Secondary priorities are identified as Russia, Ukraine, Chile and Turkey,” the Commission said in a statement a day after stressing the importance of intellectual property rights (IPR) in a paper on its future trade strategy. “While the EU does not exclude the possibility of action in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against IPR infringement, the EU is not creating a ‘black list’,” it said.

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Microsoft to step up anti-piracy stance

Microsoft Corp. is cracking down harder than ever on software piracy as it tries to boost profits, but some say the harsh repercussions facing people who use unlicensed versions of its new Windows Vista operating system could spur a backlash....The crackdown shows how much more seriously Microsoft has started taking Windows piracy, which for years has been extremely widespread in areas such as Russia and China. The Business Software Alliance, a software industry group, estimates that 35 percent of software installed on PCs worldwide is pirated.

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Hurd warning over investment in China

BRITISH companies may be taking enormous risks by investing in China, according to Lord Hurd of Westwell, the former Foreign Secretary.

He will tell a conference tomorrow that the country possesses few of the enforceable legal and regulatory provisions to which international companies are accustomed.

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Watch out! Big Brother is looking

PUTRAJAYA: The men were hunched over keyboards staring at LCD computer screens.

They were checking out the offers but were not interested in buying anything. Instead, they were relaying information on the websites through the hands-free communication set.

In another room, enforcement officers were sifting through the files to cross check the information received to make a decision whether to mount a raid.

Malaysians who sell pirated CDs, VCDs and DVDs on the Internet should realise that Big Brother is watching them.

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China steps up anti-piracy campaign

China will step up its crackdown on pirated publications during the week-long national holidays, which start Oct. 1, said an official with the National Anti-Pornography and Anti-Piracy Office.

The "golden week" holidays are expected to see massive sales of pirated products, according to the official.

Other departments across China have been urged to carry out repeated checks on pirated and illegal publications.

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Piracy to blame for no ITunes Movies For Asia

Fears of fueling the rampant movie piracy business in places like China and Hong Kong likely prevents Apple from offering movie downloads in most of Asia.

Although an Apple representative would not comment on the piracy issue in a report on Yahoo! News, it is difficult to imagine Steve Jobs and company not considering the prospect of feeding movie releases to mass duplicators just as their DVD counterparts hit the shelves at Wal-Mart.

Licensing agreements also have caused problems for Apple, as recording labels in Japan have shunned iTunes in favor of other outlets. A weak presence in the rapidly expanding Asian Internet market keeps Apple from profiting from that userbase.

"We cannot comment on the specifics but it is true that iTunes is not available in Asia," Tony Li, Apple's marketing director for Asia, said Wednesday. "That goes for music and movies."

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Chinese Google?

The Rise of Baidu (That’s Chinese for Google)

IN the summer of 1998 at a picnic in Silicon Valley, Eric Xu, a 34-year-old biochemist, introduced his shy, reserved friend Robin Li to John Wu, then the head of Yahoo’s search engine team.

Mr. Li, 30 at the time, was a frustrated staff engineer at Infoseek, an Internet search engine partly owned by Disney, a company whose fading commitment to Infoseek did not mesh with Mr. Li’s ongoing passion for search. Like Disney, Mr. Wu and Yahoo were also losing interest in the business prospects of search, and Yahoo — in a colossal corporate blunder — eventually outsourced all of its search functions to a little startup named Google.

Mr. Xu, who had called together some friends for a documentary he was making on Silicon Valley, thought the two search guys would hit it off. Mr. Wu says he exchanged greetings with Robin Li, but what most impressed him was that despite all of the pessimism surrounding search, Mr. Li remained undaunted.

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