CER reports:

Those who live in China can pass entire days using only counterfeit products. Waking up in the morning, a man could shave with a Gillette razor of a suspicious hue of blue before getting into a Mini Cooper with surprisingly small wheels. Once at work, he could switch on his overly cheap Cisco computer and work on Microsoft software that periodically crashes his system, before enjoying a 10:30 am break with a drag on an unevenly burning Marlboro. On his way home, he may stop for dinner at KFG or Pizza Huh.

Anyone who has knowingly lived such a day might think China has no legal protection for intellectual property (IP). Approximately one-quarter of the vendors on the Office of the US Trade Representative list of notorious markets for counterfeiting released in December were websites or companies in mainland China. Yet China’s intellectual property law, on paper, is actually comprehensive, and “it’s been pretty good for a long time,” said Stan Abrams, a law professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics law school in Beijing.

China started earnestly addressing intellectual property law when it acceded to the WTO in 2001 and pledged to improve its protection of IP rights. The country inked an international agreement called Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) with other countries in 2007 under the supervision of the WTO, which set out minimum standards for the protection of such rights. Since then, the law has been tinkered with on a yearly basis to become the much refined current system, which is largely in line with standards in the West.

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