Time magazine’s latest issue contains a story by Matthew Forney called Faking It, subtitled ‘Beijing’s inability to curb rampant intellectual-property theft is infuriating its trading partners’.
The piece includes a profile of trademark lawyer Joe Simone, who is Baker & McKenzie IPR hitman for China.
Faking It is accompanied by The Idea-Stealing Factory, an opinion-piece by Anne Stevenson-Yang, the managing director for the U.S. Information Technology Office in Beijing.
She makes a good point about how U.S. firms may have to adjust their business models to survive in China in an age of piracy:
You cannot wipe out piracy. But you can minimize its bottom-line impact. Just as music companies, rightly or wrongly, made peace with MP3 file-sharing services like Napster, so must manufacturers from the U.S. heartland learn strategies for coping—by developing new revenue models that emphasize service offerings around intellectual property. Such models may include lowered pricing for a developing market; universal licensing schemes to sell music, films, games and software on a subscription basis; or emphasizing revenues that flow from service and support rather than product, a model that has been successfully exploited by the Linux community.