Taiwan has made "significant progress" over the past year in fighting piracy of intellectual property, but it is still too early to say whether that would be enough to get the nation removed from a list of countries with troubling piracy records, a senior US trade official said on Friday.
The official pointed specifically to Taiwan's progress in increasing enforcement, as well as in passing legislation in such areas as the protection of pharmaceutical data.
She also said that the next round of US-Taiwan talks under their Trade and Investment Framework Agreement would take place "in the coming months."
The official made the comments in a press teleconference accompanying the release of the US Trade Representative's office's annual report on countries with which the US has trade and investment disputes. The 721-page report, the 2006 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, covers 62 countries around the world, but pays specific attention to disputes with China, the EU and Japan.
On Taiwan, which occupies 14 pages, the report notes a number of areas of improvement last year, but also expresses concern in several areas of intellectual property protection. Intellectual property piracy "continues to be an important issue in the US-Taiwan trade relationship," the report says. Washington continues to be concerned over the "prevalence" of counterfeit pharmaceuticals in Taiwan despite several large raids against manufacturers and new legislation bolstering the pharmaceutical law to prevent unfair commercial use of drug test data, it says. Another area of concern is the area of so-called "trade dress," in which clever packaging makes fakes look like the real thing.
The report singles out Taiwan's court system, in which "court procedures themselves can constitute barriers to enforcement" as a result of low fines, delays in court cases, and the inability of courts to deal with technical cases. Piracy over the Internet and illegal peer-to-peer downloading is a growing concern, the USTR office complained.
"Taiwan needs to take further effective action against piracy of copyrighted works over the Internet and to continue the strengthening of enforcement efforts," to reduce such piracy, the report says. It claims that increased efforts to stamp out such piracy "have met with mixed success."
Piracy in Taiwan cost US companies US$337 million last year, the USTR report says, citing an estimate published in February by the US International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a powerful group of US trade associations representing the high-technology, entertainment and publishing industries.
Since January last year, Taiwan has been on the so-called Section 301 "Watch List" of countries with what Washington considers serious piracy problems. Before then, it was on the more serious "Priority Watch List," but success in battling the worst piracy problems led the USTR to change its status. The USTR is scheduled to release its new annual list later this month.
However, the IIPA, in its February report, recommended that Taiwan remain on the Watch List for another year. Traditionally, the USTR has consistently adopted the IIPA recommendations. And the wording and contents of this week's USTR trade barriers document closely follows that of the IIPA report. As a result, the USTR is expected to retain Taiwan on the list.
Aside from intellectual property rights, the US appears fairly satisfied over Taiwan's progress in settling bilateral trade disputes which played prominently in a previous trade barrier report.
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