The U.S., China, and the WTO

The U.S., China, and the WTO have gotten themselves in a three-way dance over China's policy against piracy. The U.S have formally complained to the WTO stating that China is a) not doing enough to curb piracy while b) simultaneously putting too many restrictions on U.S. imports (which can only encourage piracy).

Over at Techdirt, they explore problem b a little more in depth. In a Wall Street Journal article graph, both China and France, two countries who have the strongest import restriction on film, are shown to be the two places where the MPAA is loosing the most revenue. The claim is that the U.S. government should be arguing more for a lift of import restrictions rather than stricter piracy rules.

The U.S. government seems to arguing for both to me, although I agree with the TechDirt author that focusing on less-restrictive trade would be a better avenue of pursuit. U.S. priorities seem to be a little backwards in this case .

Sniffing Out Piracy

So here's a new way to crack down on piracy: Two trained labradors, named Lucky and Flo, were able to sniff out 50,000 bootleg DVDS in Malaysia! They were sent out last month as a way to crack down on movie piracy and it's the third time they've been successful. They're supposedly on loan to Malaysia from the MPAA. They are trained to sniff a chemical used in the disks. Malaysia is among the world's top illegal movie disc producers and exporters, according to the MPAA and the US government. It's also on the US's watch list of serious copyright violators.

But, not everyone likes dogs. Some movie pirates have reportedly placed a bounty on the two dogs (...poor Lucky and Flo). Neil Gane, the MPAA's Senior Operations Executive, said the MPAA was "taking the threat seriously" and was "factoring the threat when planning operations."

Piracy in the Developing World

Although we've already discussed piracy in the developing world before, a recently written article by Nathan Spande follows the subject from a both similar, and different, angles.

Spande argues that as pirated software more readily avaiable in the developing world, more users will be using 'dirty' versions of MS Office than not. In a place like China then, where millions of users have relatively high-speed internet access, there is a potential for the majority of theses users to be utilizing pirated software on a large network. The security risk is obvious - flood the 'black' and 'grey' markets with Malware and BOOM!, you've got a huge problem on your hands.

What is there to do then? Spande offers numerous ideas, such as using open-source software, but finds that they all leave an inadequacy. MS Office and its similar software counterparts and standards for business computing, and as such, must be know for someone to compete in the job market. As such, the most viable option is to force down-pricing of the content, an unlikely event indeed.