Taipei Times: You have been dealing with the protection of intellectual property rights for over 23 years. What changes have you seen in government, police and public attitudes towards IPR issues?
Jeffrey Harris: When I fist arrived here in 1980, it was very apparent that the government wasn't taking IPR seriously. The government saw the production of infringement material as a natural evolution in the growth of a country. Copying well-known goods was a way for the local industry to bring up their quality and designability. When we tried to go to the police, they didn't care very much about IPR enforcement raids. There was also some corruption.
Needless to say the first few years I was here the government wasn't very happy and spoke out against me. The reason it wasn't happy was that we were going to international organizations and talk-ing about IPR. [US current affairs program] 60 Minutes gave us quite a bit of exposure.
That changed around 1984-1985 when the government woke up and began to realize that this wasn't a good thing. Whereas most countries have counterfeiting mainly as a local problem, most of Taiwan's counterfeited product was turning up overseas and Taiwan was trying to encourage high-tech companies to base themselves here, so lack of enforcement on IPR really did hurt its reputation. Essentially when you talk from the early 1990s onward, counterfeiting started hurting local companies as much as foreign companies.
I have never really had a problem with the police. When you gather all the evidence and hand it to them and say "please act," they'll act. I do raids throughout Asia and I would say the police in Taiwan are the best -- very easy to work with.
The biggest impediment to IPR protection today is clearly the courts and the prosecutors.
The problem with the judicial system is that as long as the infrin-gers see the legal process as a cost of doing business, they're not scared. There are a lot of judges and prosecutors who don't see IPR as important, so they don't issue search warrants. There are judges here who will take someone who robbed NT$500 from 7-Eleven and sentence them to three years, but then an infringer who's made US$100,000 from counterfeit goods will get off with a fine and a suspended sentence. The judiciary has to realize that theft is theft.
Also when we go up against an infringer who's smart and has resources, that person can drag a case out for five, six, seven, even 10 years. This is a problem especially in high-tech infringement where the life of a product could only be two years. By the time there's a sen-tence, no-one cares about the product any more.
TT: The government has recently drafted new laws governing copy-right and trademarks. Do you feel these laws go far enough?
Harris: There's been a premise in the government that copyright infringement needs to be a private criminal complaint, which basically meant that if you were a copyright holder, you would hire lawyers to file the complaint and take it through the courts. The problem with it was that because you don't get any recovery -- the court rarely awards plaintiffs costs or finds damages -- you have to shoulder the entire burden of this yourself, which is US$15,000 to US$25,000 for every single case you bring.
What the Copyright Law (著作權法) needed to do was change infringement to a public criminal pro-secution, which means the government can go in by itself and do sweeps and prosecutions. It is pretty much accepted procedure around the world. This will provide for effective enforcement. It is the greatest single change they could make in the next 10 years.
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