Wednesday, March 15, 2006

IPR passages in Wen Jiabiao's Speech before the National People's Congress

Chinese premier Wen Jiabiao presented the report on the work of his government at the Fourth Session of the Tenth National People's Congress on March 5, 2006. I this speech he mentioned intellectual property five times and trademarks one time.

After a review of past year, Wen was looking ahead in 'II. Major Tasks for This Year'. So fast forward to the relevant passages:

In the 3. Intensifying efforts to restructure industries, conserve resources and protect the environment
(...) The key to improving the technology used in industries lies in comprehensively improving our capacity for independent innovation. We need to promptly develop core technologies and improve systems integration in some important industries and create technologies, products and standards for which we own intellectual property rights.

The main measures we will adopt are: We will strengthen the role of enterprises to make them the main source of independent innovation and build a market-oriented system for technological innovation that integrates the efforts of enterprises, universities and research institutes. We will energetically pursue a name brand strategy by encouraging development of famous brands for which we hold intellectual property rights. We will strengthen the system for protecting intellectual property rights and intensify law enforcement in this area. (...)

6. Pressing ahead with reform and opening up
(...) We will severely punish, in accordance with the law, parties who engage in production and sale of counterfeit goods, commercial fraud, smuggling and selling of smuggled goods, tax evasion and tax fraud, financial and securities crimes, and violations of intellectual property rights.
(...)
We will support the export of service products and high value-added products with Chinese intellectual property rights and trademarks and continue to control the export of highly polluting products, resource products and products that consume excessive quantities of energy.
(...)

Despite all the applause Wen got from his fellow deputies for voicing lofty goals, he did not mention concrete measures to achieve those goals.

You can find the report at the site of Eastday here.

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