Benchmarking China's IPR Protection and Enforcement

In response to China's umpteenth pledge to protect intellectual property, Mr Robert Holleyman, president of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) said: "We will know China has made real progress in reducing piracy only when software companies start seeing substantial increases in sales." Read Sewell Chan's article here.

Mr Holleyman is doing something very constructive: he is trying to bench mark China's protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights. However, he is not looking at piracy of software copyrights, but to the income of the sale of genuine software. This might be the result, but is too simple, since the sale of genuine software is dependent on more factors than IPR infringements.

Mr Holleyman should consider using the enforcement/infringement ratio, which is a bit more complex, but gives a more robust answer to the question, is China's enforcement of IPR going forwards, backwards or unchanged.