Premier Yu Shyi-kun's plans to beef up Taiwan's anti-piracy measures may be too little too late to get the nation removed from the US' Special 301 Watch List, pundits said yesterday.
"I get a little concerned when there are these Johnny-come-latelies -- people who at the very last minute right before the Special 301 report -- come through with sudden announcements they're now going to take intellectual property seriously," John Eastwood, a lawyer at Winkler Partners (博仲法律事務所) and co-chair of the Intellectual Property Committee of the European Chamber of Commerce in Taipei said yesterday. "Where were these people the last couple years?"
Eastwood's counterpart at the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Taipei was also unconvinced of the efficacy of Yu's move.
"My suspicion is that [Premier Yu's announcement] is too late," said Jeffrey Harris, co-chair of the chamber's Intellectual Property Committee and director of Orient Commercial Enquiries, a consulting firm specialized in IPR. "This should have been done last year."
For five years Taiwan has been included on the US' Special 301 Priority Watch List of serious violators of intellectual property rights. The annual review of the list is expected to take place in April. Violators of the Special 301 -- a clause of the US Omnibus Trade Act of 1988 -- could face possible trade sanctions, but to date no action has been taken against Taiwan.
In advance of the review of the Special 301 list, the premier announced Monday that he was increasing the reward for tip-offs leading to the arrest of pirated music, movie and software disk manufacturers from NT$1 million to NT$10 million.
Last year the value of counterfeit products seized by the government increased by 20 percent to top NT$8 billion, but the number of prosecutions for movie piracy, for example, fell by 36 percent to just 671 cases, according to the Motion Picture Association of Taiwan. Punishment for copyright infringement handed down by local courts rarely exceeds six months in jail, despite this being the minimum sentence according to the law. And with prison time readily converted to a fine of NT$900 per day, the legal system does little to deter IPR violators.
While welcoming the increased reward for reporting offenders as "a step in the right direction," AmCham's Harris expressed disappointment by the slow progress Taiwan has made in tackling IPR infringement.
"Even though last year was the year of IPR, very little was actually done to tackle the IPR problem," he said.
Eastwood also offered some praise for the government's efforts, giving it full marks for getting IPR protection laws on the statute books in advance of Taiwan's entry into the WTO in January 2002. "Now they have to provide effective protection of those rights," he said.
Other areas where this is a problem -- Thailand, Indonesia, China -- are developing economies. Taiwan is the only first-world economy that is a "piracy haven," Eastwood said. A place such as Taiwan, that prides itself on the prowess of its technology sector, should be more focused on the protection of intellectual property, he said.
And it's not just a problem for foreign companies. Taiwan's own entertainment industry is suffering.
"The local recording industry is being killed by piracy," Harris said.
One in two disks sold in Taiwan is a fake. "You can burn 20,000 disks in five or six hours and ship them out," Harris said. "That is very hard to attack."
Another problem is that police cannot arrest piracy violators without a law suit being filed first. And at a cost of between US$15,000 and US$25,000 in legal fees and up to three years bogged down in the courts, many copyright victims choose not to prosecute, Harris said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day