IPR and US imperialism - the WTO-column

"Is protection of intellectual property not a matter of the 'have's' and the 'have nots'," asked a reporter at an press conference on this subject by the Dutch multinational Philips and the Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration (SIPA) - a department I had never heard of before. Of course the daring reporter was set straight by all officials at the meeting, including a Dutch minister.
Without protection of intellectual property there would be no innovation, was the message from both governments. "Nobody wants to work for free." Philips obvious does not want to work for free, but about this assumption later a bit more.
Dutch business people who visited the offices of SIPA were impressed by this government department. "They have at least thirty people working in their offices," said one of them. The Shanghainese officials were promptly invited to the Netherlands.
China has many policies and the art for observers like me is to distinguish between what are real priorities and what is politely called 'window dressing'. Director Chen Zhixing of SIPA gave very inspiring speeches, but became a bit defensive when a Chinese business man who had seen fake copies of his products at the auction site Alibaba.com asked what Chen could do for him. "Maybe you should be to another bureau," Chen said. In China at least seven departments are in charge of enforcing infringements of intellectual property, so identifying the right bureau could indeed a bit of a challenge. For me this was an indication that about 90 percent of the struggle for IPR is window-dressing.

At the excellent banquet before the conference I sat next to a Dutch CEO who, during the conversation, almost apologetic, allowed himself a theoretical exercise, as he called it himself. "Those intellectual property rights are invented by the Americans to protect their own interests," he said. "They are not necessarily in the interest of developing countries like China." What would be the alternative, I wanted to know. "Open source, of course," he said. "Share the intellectual property and divide the wealth and knowledge more equally over the world."
Just a few years ago the Chinese government took just that direction as it decided against Microsoft and in favor of Linux, the most famous example of the open-source approach at the internet. China would be the only country in the world that could choose such an alternative, said my CEO. Officially China has taken the road of IPR-protection, but as we can note on the street the citizens and companies are not following suit. To lure foreign investors, the government of course has to say it will protect the legal rights of the foreign investors and increasingly the larger Chinese companies who also have an interest in protecting their intellectual goodies.
"It is anyway a lost struggle," said the CEO next to me. "The Americans have already won."
Maybe it is a lost struggle but it is not yet over, and for the time being - as long as the advantages of 'sharing' intellectual rights are higher than adhering to them - China will be a battlefield.