Forum - View topicNEWS: Bootleggers Boot Legitimate Products from China
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Ranmah
 Posts: 294 Location: Stomp'n on Tokyo Tower |
|
|||
Or "Triad" back on topic. It will only be a matter of time before the Chinese goverment made a goof and arrests the bootleggers. Worst case senario the Japanese Company pulls all of its licensed titles in China. Lets hope it dosen't come to that. |
||||
|
||||
Kazuki-san
 Posts: 2251 Location: Houston, TX |
|
|||
One, copyright infringment is no longer a solely civil issue. http://www.cybercrime.gov/netsum.htm |
||||
|
||||
cyrax777
 Posts: 1825 Location: the desert |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
AnimeHeretic
 Posts: 179 |
|
|||
Good point, though I think he was focussing on what's LIKELY to happen. I did e-mail the author a year ago. He told me that since he started working for an Anime distributor, he learned that the law was actually stricter than he thought when he wrote that in 1999. [And maybe I should clarify to everyone that when I say I'd be interested in hearing flaws, I mean just that and am not making a challenge. It seems to be an interesting article and if there are errors, I'd like to get the more accurate info. Feel free to PM me] |
||||
|
||||
|
Kazuki-san
Posts: 2251 Location: Houston, TX |
|
|||
And that's a bit different then owning a trademark that you shouldn't. They have merely applied for it. The application has to be reviewed first by a trademark attorney (which usually takes several months). If the attorney does decides that the mark should be awared, it is published in the Official Gazette after which the M.A.M.E. people have 30 days to lodge an objection (or a request to extend the deadline to lodge an objection) if they wish. They won't have much to stand on though, if they don't already have it registered first. US Trademarks are first-to-file. Not that they still couldn't raise a legit objection.
I figured so when I all I could find was references to VCRs and fansub tapes. I'll go over it in detail tomorrow when I have more time (at work  ), and PM you if I find any flaws or anything.
|
||||
|
||||
Erufu
 Posts: 191 |
|
|||
|
Ah, yes. At work where I get most of my stuff done, too.
As for how long it takes for a copyright lawyer to work... I heard the norm was 5 years and around $18,000. |
||||
|
||||
|
Kazuki-san
Posts: 2251 Location: Houston, TX |
|
|||
Trademark lawyers review every application to ensure that it is in compliance with all statutes. They are employed by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The fee to file a trademark application is $325 for online submissions and $375 for paper. There is no extra fee for the USPTO lawyer to review the application. If you want to hire your own Trademark lawyer to deal with the whole application process for you, then yeah, that could take a long time, but the application is still reviewed by the USPTO lawyer. The actual review will take a few months, but the whole process from application to registration of a mark takes 10-18 months If the mark is approved, protection is backdated to the date of the application. |
||||
|
||||
|
ac_dropout
Posts: 88 Location: Newark, NJ |
|
|||
|
Reading this article I get the impression that PRC is becoming a nation of laws. I mean they now have a whole complicated process of registering Intellectual Property.
Japan to China is like Hawaii to the USA. It is sort of beneath the notice of most Chinese people. I wouldn't be surprised if the person in China that approved the Trademark just looked at it and went "brand name for Crayon, okay." I read that in China some individual filed the trademark of famous Chinese actors using homophones characters, so that he could sell them to cosmetic companies. There was is another interesting case of a Coffeeshop in China called XinBuck which was sued by Starbuck. Xin is the Chinese for Star. However, the most interesting IP case I heard was that in Brazil and China, the patent to Viagra was denied. Both country claim that a sexual enhancing drug was not unique to their society. There have also been some interesting IP cases involving USA anime companies and Japanese companies as well over the years. Just go to show sometimes the results of enforcing IP laws are not always intuitively moral or ethical by most otaku standards. |
||||
|
||||
|
ac_dropout
Posts: 88 Location: Newark, NJ |
|
|||
What was that peer-to-peer company that got shut down by the record labels again? The precedent has already been set if fansubbers went to court with a license holder in the USA. Granted I would agree that most fansubbers don't have much assests to begin with. But what if communities like Anipike or ANN, which have more assests were dragged into the a lawsuit. Claiming they were fostering an environment, not neccessarily condoning, of a gateway to inform fans about fansubs....Would we start turning in every distro and fansubber we knew to save the community.... It would be an interesting debate... |
||||
|
||||
Iria51
 Posts: 138 Location: San Antonio, Tx |
|
|||
|
In Hangzhou we saw a clothing store called Playboy which was geared towards men's clothes. It even had the Playboy bunny logo outside of the store. We just laughed about it at the time but then we saw another one in another part of the city, so it was obviously a chain. China is the wild west right now as far as economic growth and economic lawlessness are concerned. The ironic part is that my girlfriend's brother is a police detective and he routinely buys VCD movies, at 5 yuen each, off of the corner vendor. I watched Airforce One on VCD, in Mandarin, subtitled in Cantonese. Most Chinese people do not really view all of this a problem, because it has gone unchecked for so long.
|
||||
|
||||
|
JW
Posts: 8 Location: North Pole |
|
|||
I thought both Mandarin and Cantonese have the same writing 
|
||||
|
||||
|
Iria51
Posts: 138 Location: San Antonio, Tx |
|
|||
|
Oops, I should have clarified that it was spoken in Mandarin and subtitled in Cantonese. The two languages are different and not everyone knows them both. Mandarin is the "official" language of China but in Guangzhou, where I watched the movie, Cantonese is also spoken by some. He had the subtitles on so that he could understand what was being said.
Last edited by Iria51 on Thu Feb 24, 2005 12:38 pm; edited 2 times in total |
||||
|
||||
|
ac_dropout
Posts: 88 Location: Newark, NJ |
|
|||
|
The concept of IP is really a Western concept promoted in the USA as new model for doing business.
We take it for granted that IP is a given in the US. However, prior to the IP business model, USA "borrowed/stole" a lot of IP through immigrants that transfer technologies and ideas when they settled here. A case in point in China's favor would be how much royalty should be collected for the IP of the magnetic compass, gun powder, and ketchup? I'm not trying to justify what the Chinese company did. However, problems like this will continue to rise when China IP laws and processes are matured, due to the fact there is no internation governing body to IP regulation. So each State has their own IP standards and regulations. Also shouldn't the Japanese publisher also take some of the blame for their own oversight for not registering Crayon-Shin chan in China in a timely manner. That's the largest market on the planet, did they really think there would be no competition there? |
||||
|
||||
|
ac_dropout
Posts: 88 Location: Newark, NJ |
|
|||
Slightly different grammer and character sets. There are terms that are unique to cantonese and they developed their own characters for them. However, most educated Cantonese speaker are educated in proper common vernacular Chinese writing. So Cantonese pop songs are usually written in this vernacular. Few Cantonese people speak in that grammer or vocabulary. Anyways the subtitles are usually done in more vancular Mandarin because there is a larger market for it in Taiwan, Singapore, and China where these movies are exported. |
||||
|
||||
Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
|
|||
|
One has to remember that in the fundamental Marxist/Leninist doctrine no one has the right to own anything as everything is for the community at no cost. Chairman Mao took this on board as one of his highest rules which though nowadays is slowly being ignored, it's still an old habit that the Chinese Government will have to break themselves from if they want to become an economic power, and not just another Port Royale.
|
||||
|
||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group