It looks like the edition of former US president Bill Clinton's memoirs in US bookstores. It is in English, has a glossy cover with the same photo of the tanned, smiling Clinton, the same bronze-tinted title, and a spine announcing its publisher to be Knopf.
But the shrunken print, tissue-thin paper and smeared black-and-white photographs inside betray its true identity -- a pirated copy of the former president's book, My Life, printed just weeks after the original appeared in the US, and sold by roadside hawkers for as little as US$5. The book retails for US$35 in the US.
PHOTO: AP
The bootleg is another example of the widespread defiance of copyrights and patents here, a problem that two leading US business groups said on Thursday threatened to chill US trade with China. In an otherwise encouraging annual report on US business in China released on Thursday, the US Chamber of Commerce in China singled out lax intellectual property right protection as the Achilles' heel that might cripple investor confidence.
"There's virtually no enforcement" of intellectual property rights in China, Charles Martin, president of the chamber, said at a news conference. "It's worsening, and there's now a flood of counterfeit exports."
Myron Brilliant, a vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, said his organization's annual report on China, to be released next week, would also single out China's intellectual property abuses as a key threat to US businesses.
"We see ourselves as friends of China, but our patience has its limits," Brilliant said in an interview.
"The time is ticking for China on this front," he said.
Brilliant is in Beijing this week to press Chinese officials for stronger protection of industrial designs, patents and commercial secrets.
Violations of intellectual property rights have long irked Americans doing business in China, but both US business organizations emphasized that their members' impatience over the problem had reached new heights. Brilliant said top executives had often raised the issue with him.
"That's a sea change," he said. "Before, this was just an issue for Hong Kong and China reps, but now it's the CEO's of major companies who are complaining to us."
Business executives said two recent decisions by China particularly threatened to dampen international investor enthusiasm.
One was a decision by China's patent office to override Pfizer's patent for its best-selling impotence drug, Viagra, arguing that the original patent did not adequately explain the drug's technical uses. That was followed by the Ministry of Commerce's dismissal of a complaint by General Motors against a Chinese carmaker, SAIC Chery Automobile, which makes a car strikingly similar to GM's Spark.
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