US threats to cut off trade benefits to Brazil over piracy of movies, software and music are unacceptable given the nation's efforts to combat the contraband, Brazil's Justice Ministry and lawmakers said on Friday.
Trade in pirated versions of the latest Hollywood movies and US CDs and DVDs is rampant in Brazil. One of Brazil's biggest contraband markets stands just a few miles from the Justice Ministry.
Washington warned Brazil last Wednesday that it could lose billions of dollars worth of duty-free access to US markets each year unless it does more to crack down on copyright theft.
Brazilian lawmakers acknowledged the nation's huge piracy problem but said officials were doing a lot to overcome it with better coordination between law enforcement and government agencies.
"Brazil has a law, Brazil has legislation, Brazil has judges," Clovis da Silva Monteiro, who coordinates the ministry's antipiracy committee, said in a congressional debate on the trade dispute. "This is just a way of exerting pressure."
Brazil has signed international accords against copyright theft but pirated goods from around the world flood into the nation from neighboring Paraguay. Others are made domestically.
Piracy cost US companies US$700 million in lost Brazilian sales during 2003 alone, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a US consortium of music, movie, software and publishing groups.
The alliance has long pushed for the US to suspend benefits for Brazil under the Generalized System of Preferences in retaliation for copyright theft. The program allows some developing countries to ship goods to the US without paying duties.
The US said it would renew Brazil's eligibility for the program for three months -- rather than the customary year -- while it reviewed the complaint.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by