Siren Got Rid of the Letters "Starbucks"

Starbucks revised its logo for the fourth time (1971, 1987, 1992 and now in 2001), see overview here.
It was announced already January 5, 2011 by senior creative manager Mike P. here.

Logo change announced on Hong Kong TV on the MTR
Photo: Danny Friedmann

However, only May 27, 2011 the new logo was introduced in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. To change a brand like that is a huge operation, which starts with the design and customer surveys, then the registration of the trademark for the new variant logo.

The rationale behind the move, in the words of Mike P:

"From the start, we wanted to recognize and honor the important equities of the iconic Starbucks logo. So we broke down the four main parts of the mark – color, shape, typeface and the Siren. After hundreds of explorations, we found the answer in simplicity. Removing the words from the mark, bringing in the green, and taking the Siren out of her ring. For forty years she’s represented coffee, and now she is the star."

TGIF, But What Happened To This Author's Moral Rights On The IPR.gov.cn Site?

星期五: Friday

Thank Goodness It's Friday

I just finished a blog post on Professor Ken Shao's interesting article, see here, which ironically is about morality in copyright, and now I see his article republished on the site of Intellectual Property Protection in China ipr.gov.cn: Copyright battles shouldn't be fought for the wrong reasons. The source "Global Times" is mentioned, but not Professor Shao's name. And there is no link going to the original site, so you have to do some detective work to find the author.

I know it's almost weekend but not giving attribution to the author is not something I expect from ipr.gov.cn, nor something an author needs to accept.  

Article 22 Copyright Law: "In the following cases, a work may be exploited without permission from, and without payment of remuneration to, the copyright owner, provided that the name of the author and the title of the work shall be mentioned and the other rights enjoyed by the copyright owner by virtue of this Law shall not be prejudiced:
(3) reuse or citation, for any unavoidable reason, of a published work in newspapers, periodicals, at radio stations, television stations or any other media for the purpose of reporting current events;"

Ok, it can be republished, however...

... there are moral rights in the Chinese copyright law. Here are two examples:
Article 10 Copyright Law: "The term "copyright" shall include the following personality rights and property rights: (l) the right of publication, that is, the right to decide whether to make a work available to the public;
(2) the right of authorship, that is, the right to claim authorship and to have the author's name mentioned in connection with the work;".

Online Copyright: Norms Or the Law, One Of Them Needs To Give In

On the road to respect for copyright there is not much traffic
Photo Danny Friedmann

Professor Ken Shao, director of China Law Programme of the Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, has an interesting article in the Global Times in which he persuasively explains that a balance between copyright protection and access to knowledge should be struck. Professor Shao points to the "expectation" issue and that internet users have to be made aware that their expectation to get everything online for free is not justified. There seems indeed a disconnect between the norms of internet users and the law. Then he questions whether Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd, who successfully sued Baidu before a Shanghai court, did so for the wrong reasons. The Shanghai People's Court decided that since Baidu had knowledge of the copyright infringements against Shanda, the ISP safe harbor provision did not apply.

Professor Shao's argument that copyright might overprotect and stifle creativity is valid as such, but does not apply to the decision of Shanda whether or not to sue Baidu. The reason Shanda sued Baidu because they wanted to stop the copyright infringements and be compensated for the damages inflicted upon itself. Nothing frivolous here. Commercial companies should use the law that is available to their best interests. That is their obligation they have towards their employees and stockholders. And the Shanghai court needs to apply the law regardless of who is the plaintiff and defendant, and not in a teleological way (towards a certain goal, in this case access of knowledge by Baidu users). In a moral sense professor Shao might be right if Baidu would not unfairly benefit and if the law was applied consistently (but then the law could be changed) to copyright holders, but his lofty expectations that commercial companies follow many moral principles might not be based in reality.

Although I do not completely agree with Professor Shao, I think his article is a great kick-off for further discussion on the issues copyright morality, a balanced copyright and rising awareness for the internet users about the topic. Read it here.

USITC: "China's IP and Indigenous Innovation Cost U.S. 48,2 billion dollar"

Photo Danny Friedmann
"Maybe we need more resources for IP enforcement?"

The U.S. International Trade Commission report (ITC), commissioned by the U.S. Senate has been published. The title of the ITC report is: China: Effects of Intellectual Property Infringement and Indigenous Innovation Policies on the U.S. Economy. One of the effects, according to the writers, is that IP infringements and preferential treatment for indigenous innovation cost the U.S. economy in 2009 48,2 billion dollar. We have to be patient for the 2010 result.  I have glanced through the whole thing. It is nice that they refer to an article of mine “China: China’s National IP Strategy 2008; Feasible Commitments or Road to Nowhere Paved with Good Intentions?" on biblio-page 7.

Digital Economy Act: Google Points Finger To China, But Patent Application Points to Google

Photo: Danny Friedmann
Google shedding crocodile tears about freedom of speech

Will the real freedom of expression lover please stand up? 

Just as "Digital Opportunity", Professor Ian Hargreaves' independent review of UK's intellectual property law came out, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google is comparing UK's plans on copyright enforcement with censorship in China.   

He was quoted by Josh Halliday saying: “So, ‘let’s whack off the DNS’. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say ‘I don’t like free speech so I’ll whack off all those DNSs’ – that country would be China." Read Mr Halliday's article for PaidContent here.

Well Google does have first-hand experience with censorship, because in most countries, including China, they filter whatever the government wants them to filter. Ironically, Google went even beyond what is required by governments and filed an application in the U.S. to patent censoring methodology, that censors depending on the location of the user. Namely: 'Variable user interface based on document access privileges', U.S. Patent application number: 10/953,496, filed: September 30, 2004, assignee: Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA), you can find it here.

Reaction to Professor Navarro's China Bashing: We Get What We Paid For

Due to the melamine scare many Chinese parents buy 
milk powder in foreign supermarkets;
such as Walmart, or in Hong Kong
Photo Danny Friedmann

July last year I posted a blog about professor Peter Navarro who questioned whether profit making is the only goal of Chinese counterfeiters, read here. Now IP Dragon likes provocative straight forward opinions that do not need to be always politically correct, but the title of professor Navarro's book "Death by China" is a bit too negative, and too little nuanced for this blogger.

One should never judge a book by its cover, I know, but as far as I understood professor Navarro's thesis, see here, is based on three parts: counterfeiting kills, China's mercantilism "kills" jobs, and military buildup could become lethal. About the counterfeiting part:

Yes, most lethal counterfeited products come from China, because most counterfeited products come from China. However, if a product is imported into another country, it is that country's responsibility. Therefore customs should have more resources to make sure the products that enter are safe. This will make the imported products more expensive, yes. But many products coming from China are still too cheap. Why, because hidden costs are not factored in, and we will be presented the bill later on.

• Health and safety costs;
• Environmental costs;
• Labour costs.

Because of many reasons covered on this blog China's protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights is challenged. And these problems do not go away anytime soon. So if China cannot guarantee product safety, the countries that import from China (that is about all countries) should take that responsibility in their own hands and rigorously and massively test products.

IP Dragon's Chinese Provinces Counterfeit & Piracy Observatory

This post is a work in process, similar to IP Dragon's Worldwide Seizures and Measures Against Counterfeit and Pirated Goods Originating in China.


Provinces

Heilongjiang 黑龙江

Jilin 吉林

Liaoning 辽宁

Dandong companies have business talks with universities, China Daily, August 15, 2011.

Qinghai 青海

Gansu 甘肃

Gansu: Patent applications in Zhangye exceeded over 600, ipr.gov.cn, May 23, 2011.

Shaanxi 陕西

Shanxi 山西

Hebei 河北

Hebei: Tangshan promoted patent capacity in local industrial parks, ipr.gov.cn, May 26, 2011.
IP Scene, China Daily, August 14, 2011.

Sichuan 四川
Danny Friedmann, Trademarks That "Innovate and Beautfy Life": China Trademark Festival, Chengdu, IP Dragon, August 19, 2011.

Hubei 湖北

Henan 河南
Anger over fake wall, Xinhua, May 15, 2011.

Shandong 山东

Anhui 安徽

Jiangsu 江苏

Yunnan 云南

Guizhou 贵州

Hunan 湖南

Hunan opens various channels for reporting IP violations, ipr.gov.cn, May 26, 2011.

Jiangxi 江西

Zhejiang 浙江

Hainan 海南

Guangdong 广东
IP Scene, China Daily, August 14, 2011.

Hao Nan, State-level zone for IP finance, investment (Nanhai district, Foshan) China Daily, June 22, 2011.
Police arrest 15 in crackdown on counterfeit Viagra in Guangzhou, China Daily via ipr.gov.cn, May 26, 2011.

Fujian 福建

Municipalities

Beijing 北京

Peking duck in counterfeit battle, Shanghai Daily, May 19, 2011

IP Scene, China Daily, August 14, 2011.

Tianjin 天津

Shanghai 上海

Chongqing 重庆

Autonomous regions

Xinjiang 新疆

Inner Mongolia 内蒙古

Tibet 西藏

Ningxia 宁夏

Guangxi 广西
IP Scene, China Daily, August 14, 2011.

Special Administrative Region

Hong Kong 香港

Macau 澳門

Other

Taiwan 臺灣

Singapore 新加坡

Whitebook on IP Protection in 2010: Is White the New Black?

Photo Danny Friedmann

A: "Milestones of the past 

don't equal

 beacons to the future" 

B: "That is so 2010!"

The 12th Five Year Plan (2011-2015) has already started but its interesting to see what happened during the last year of the 11th Five Year Plan (2006-2010). If you don't know your history, you don't know your future, as Bob Marley already sung, right? The State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), although it is only responsible for the protection and enforcement of patents, published a rather self-complacent "whitebook" on Intellectual Property Protection in 2010. Let us put it this way, it is great to say what has been done, but on the enforcement front there is still a lot of work to be done.

Readers of this blog know that its author does not believe in mass campaigns such as Operation Strike of the Sword and Swordnet. Not because they do not sound cool, they do. The problem is they do not work in the longer run, read more here.

This time I skip Benjamin Disraeli's phrase, because Thomas Miles, who researches judicial behaviour cracked a relevant joke during the 2011 Coase Lecture in Law and Economics: "Lawyers have only two reactions to a statistical analysis: it's either obvious, or wrong."

Statistics about patent applications are interesting but in the end only the granted patents count:
SIPO granted 814,825 patents: a year-on-year increase of 40.0%.

• 740,620 were granted to domestic applications, representing 90.9% of the total and a year-on-year increase of 47.6%; 
• 74,205 were granted to foreign applications, representing 9.1% of the total and a year-on-year decrease of 7.5%. 

So how to explain the decrease of patents granted to foreign companies/individuals, while the applications year-on-year rose by 13,9 percent?  

Percentage of domestic patent applications granted: 740,620/1,109,428 = 67 percent
Percentage of foreign patent applications granted: 74,205/112,858 = 66 percent.
So that is nearly the same. Are we seeing now the delay of the financial crisis or a lack of trust in the Chinese patent system in Europe and the U.S., which resulted in not many applications before 2010, so that in 2010 there is a decrease? And that in 2010 the applications increased?

However, although the information was not provided, I think one must also know about what kind of patents we are talking. In former years foreign companies/individuals often applied and were granted a much higher percentage of invention patents, while Chinese companies/individuals often applied for and were granted utility patents (to harness incremental innovation).

The aggregated information for both domestic and foreigner companies/individuals:

• 135,110 invention patents were granted, representing 16.6% and a year-on-year increase of 5.2%.
• 344,472 utility model patents were granted, representing 42.3% of the total and a year-on-year increase of 69.0%; 
• 335,243 industrial design patents were granted, representing 41.1% of the total and a year-on-year increase of 34.3%. 

For the 12th Five Year Plan the Chinese government wants to increase invention patent ownership from 1.7 per 10,000 people to 3.3. The arguments against using this kind of ratios to achieve innovation I give in my post Patents in China: Quantity obsessed, quality challenged.

China Launches International Patent Database

Photo Danny Friedmann
Raise the flag, 
there is reason for celebration

China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) has launched a new patent search, see here.
The search system also offers machine translation: China Patent Machine Translation (CPMT).

"The system has more than 80 million abstracts of patent-related documents, and more than 70 million full-text documents and charts, collected from nearly 100 countries, regions and organizations." Read the article about it in the China Daily here.

Good news if you want to see which patents are out there and what quality they have.

Yao Ming Wants To Reign Supreme Over Yao Ming Era

Photo Danny Friedmann
Story for the Sunday (星期日) 

Xinhua reported that Yao Ming, the tallest basketballer in the NBA, who has a contract with Reebok to wear their products, sued Wuhan Yunhe Dashayu Sportswear Co., Ltd for allegedly printing in Yao Ming's handwriting 姚明 一代 (Yao Ming Yi Dai) which means Yao Ming era or Yao Ming Era in English on shoes and apparel, see picture here. It was said that Yao Ming Yi Dai is popular in Hunan and that the alleged infringer wants to sell it nationwide.

Yao Ming registered his name as a trademark in several fields in 2002. However, Xinhua wrote that other "companies and individuals have registered Yao-Ming-related trademarks in China, like Yao Ming World, Yao Ming Empire, Yao Ming Rockets etc. Most of these trademarks are not printed on products."

Hopefully Yao Ming's era as basketball player is not coming to a close, since the Houston Rockets center is recovering from an ankle that could turn out his Achilles' heel. 

Read Chen Zhi's Xinhua article here.

Polo For the People

"Everybody was Kung Fu fighting  playing polo"

After 'Marco Polo Hiuui' and 'Polo Santa Roberta' in Hong Kong there is another Polo clone in Wangfujiang 王府井 Dajie 大街 , the busy shopping avenue of Beijing, called Polo Villae. The logo is a polo player shown from the right side of the polo pony. I am sure that the exclusive brand Polo Ralph Lauren is also not happy with this brand, but what adds insult to injury is the way the Polo Villae shop presents its products. Cheap, full of clutter and disorganised. A kind of Polo for the masses. They seem to clone the brand minus its exclusivity, thereby damaging the goodwill and reputation of the original brand.

Wangfujing Dajie in Beijing

From a distance it looks still exclusive

Pile up your products to show
your products are exclusive?

Bags and clothes, just
like the other Polo clones

You can find the infectious song Everybody was Kung Fu fighting by Carl Douglas (made in 1974) mixed with the hilarious comedy Kung Fu Hustle (2004), which makes all kinds of references to other movies, including the Matrix, here.    

Media Piracy in Emerging Economy Report: Omnipresent China Conspicuously Absent

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, is a very interesting report edited by Joe Karaganis, program director of Social Science Research Council. Digital copying of music, film and software works that fall outside the boundaries of copyright are not only a dilemma in developed countries but also in emergent markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa, which are covered in country cases. The report also deals with Mexico and Bolivia.

Conspicuously absent is a country case on China. However, the reader can observe this omnipresent protaganist, during the whole 400 pages, a bit like the great white whale in the novel Moby Dick.
The report contends refreshingly that the question is not whether stronger enforcement can preserve existing market structures, but whether business models can emerge that can serve the low end of the media market. Or in the words of Karaganis: the choice is between high piracy/low price and not high piracy/high price.
The report seems to take the copyright law of the respective jurisdictions as a given.

The report has many interesting critical notes, including about the alleged link between piracy and organized crime/terrorism. It persuasively makes the case that in the time that film and music were consumed via CD and DVD and optical disk production was only lucrative on a industrial scale, it might have had some relevance. But first cottage production of optical disks became possible and now even they are in competition with down loading consumers.

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, funded by the Canadian International Development Research Center and the Ford Foundation, is available via pdf under a Consumer's Dilemma license, see here.

Fast Technology Transfer/IPR Infringements Slows Down China's High Speed Train

Photo: Danny Friedmann
High-speed train just got slower.
Getting a ticket even more so.

Infringed intellectual property rights can have negative influences on society. During the manufacturing process of these goods labour and environmental minimum standards, already challenged in China, can be ignored without ever being checked. Then the products of the manufacturing process can cause real safety challenges to the public.

China's high profile high-speed trains were so rapidly developed without much consideration to foreign IPR rights, see here. Now it becomes clear that not only IPR infringements were condoned, but that some safety standards seem to have been skipped altogether too, see here.

The Railways Ministry announced that the trains now need to slow down from 218 miles per hour (350 kilometers per hour) to 186 miles per hour (almost 300 kilometers per hour).

Shake or Crush Your Hand: Huawei versus ZTE versus Huawei

Photo: Danny Friedmann
Shake Or Crush Your Hand, you choose. 

What if you are developing a product but your competitor has patented some technology needed to achieve the technical result? And at the same time you have some patents that you know you competitor likes to use? You might consider to cross-license. However, from a patent strategy point of view, excluding your competitor from some crucial technology might be the best thing to do.

Bien Perez reports in the South China Morning Post (April 30, 2011): "Huawei had also invited ZTE on many occassions to enter into cross-patent licensing negotiations, but was unsuccessful."

Then April 28, Huawei sues ZTE in Germany, France and Hungary for alleged patent infringement related to its data card and Long Term Evolution standard (candidate for 4G mobile communication standard) technologies, and trademark infringement.

April 29, ZTE counter sues Huawei for alleged patent infringement on Long Term Evolution.

"Proxy PRC Courts" in Europe and now also China

China Hearsay's Stan Abrams is not surprised that the legal fight "in a most non-harmonious fashion" between two Chinese giants took place overseas, see here.

It is interesting that Chinese competitors fight some patent and trademark issues abroad. But I think it becomes really interesting now that ZTE has sued Huawei in China. ZTE also threaten to take a series of legal actions globally to protect its IPR rights.

UPDATE:  The Hungarian site Portfolio.hu has a picture provided by Huawei that it uses to proof that ZTE is infringing its trademark. See Porfolio.hu's article Huawei files patent, trademark lawsuits against ZTE, rival rejects charges.