Still Dissatisfied After All These Years: Intellectual Property, Post-WTO China, and the Avoidable Cycle of Futility

Commentators have widely discussed the piracy and counterfeiting problems in China. Every year, the United States is estimated to lose billions of dollars due to piracy and counterfeiting in the country alone. Published as part of the U.S.-China Trade: Opportunities and Challenges Symposium, this Essay focuses on the recent debate about whether the U.S. administration should file a formal complaint against China with the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization over inadequate enforcement of intellectual property rights. The Essay begins by articulating four reasons why the administration should not do so. It then compares the approach recently proposed to the administration with the approach taken by the administration in the 1980s and early 1990s. This Essay argues that the current proposal would create a cycle of futility similar to the cycles created by the decade-old American intellectual property policy toward China. To avoid these cycles, the Essay highlights four remedial areas on which the administration and the business community should focus. The Essay concludes with three observations that provide insight into the piracy and counterfeiting problems in China and the difficulty in alleviating those problems

Still Dissatisfied After All These Years: Intellectual Property, Post-WTO China, and the Avoidable Cycle of Futility

Commentators have widely discussed the piracy and counterfeiting problems in China. Every year, the United States is estimated to lose billions of dollars due to piracy and counterfeiting in the country alone. Published as part of the U.S.-China Trade: Opportunities and Challenges Symposium, this Essay focuses on the recent debate about whether the U.S. administration should file a formal complaint against China with the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization over inadequate enforcement of intellectual property rights. The Essay begins by articulating four reasons why the administration should not do so. It then compares the approach recently proposed to the administration with the approach taken by the administration in the 1980s and early 1990s. This Essay argues that the current proposal would create a cycle of futility similar to the cycles created by the decade-old American intellectual property policy toward China. To avoid these cycles, the Essay highlights four remedial areas on which the administration and the business community should focus. The Essay concludes with three observations that provide insight into the piracy and counterfeiting problems in China and the difficulty in alleviating those problems

The Copyright Divide

Most recently, the recording industry filed 261 lawsuits against individuals who illegally downloaded and distributed a large amount of music via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as KaZaA, Grokster, iMesh, and Gnutella. Although the industry\u27s recent approach was controversial and resulted in major criticisms from legislators, academics, civil libertarians, consumer advocates, and university officials, the copyright holders\u27 aggressive tactics are not new. In fact, copyright holders have been known for using, or encouraging their government to use, coercive power to protect their creative works. Only a decade ago, the U.S. copyright industries have lobbied their government to use strong-armed tactics to coerce China into protecting intellectual property rights. Succumbing to U.S. trade pressure, the Chinese authorities eventually raided pirate factories and handed out harsh penalties, including the death penalty and life imprisonment in severe cases, on their citizens. The similarities between the RIAA and China stories were more than a coincidence and could be further linked to a third story. That story took place two centuries ago when the United States was still a less developed country. At that time, book piracy was rampant, and the United States was considered one of the most notorious pirating nations in the world. This Article brings together, for the first time, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, twentieth-century China, and twenty-first-century cyberspace and analyzes them using a cross-cultural, cross-systemic, cross-temporal, and cross-sectoral approach. This Article not only highlights the striking similarities among the three stories, but also argues that these similarities provide insight into the war on piracy, intellectual property law reforms, and international harmonization efforts

The Copyright Divide

Most recently, the recording industry filed 261 lawsuits against individuals who illegally downloaded and distributed a large amount of music via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as KaZaA, Grokster, iMesh, and Gnutella. Although the industry\u27s recent approach was controversial and resulted in major criticisms from legislators, academics, civil libertarians, consumer advocates, and university officials, the copyright holders\u27 aggressive tactics are not new. In fact, copyright holders have been known for using, or encouraging their government to use, coercive power to protect their creative works. Only a decade ago, the U.S. copyright industries have lobbied their government to use strong-armed tactics to coerce China into protecting intellectual property rights. Succumbing to U.S. trade pressure, the Chinese authorities eventually raided pirate factories and handed out harsh penalties, including the death penalty and life imprisonment in severe cases, on their citizens. The similarities between the RIAA and China stories were more than a coincidence and could be further linked to a third story. That story took place two centuries ago when the United States was still a less developed country. At that time, book piracy was rampant, and the United States was considered one of the most notorious pirating nations in the world. This Article brings together, for the first time, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, twentieth-century China, and twenty-first-century cyberspace and analyzes them using a cross-cultural, cross-systemic, cross-temporal, and cross-sectoral approach. This Article not only highlights the striking similarities among the three stories, but also argues that these similarities provide insight into the war on piracy, intellectual property law reforms, and international harmonization efforts

The History of Gyalthang Under Chinese Rule: Memory, Identity, and Contested Control in a Tibetan Region of Northwest Yunnan

This dissertation analyzes how the Chinese Communist Party attempted to politically, economically, and culturally integrate Gyalthang (Zhongdian/Shangri-la), a predominately ethnically Tibetan county in Yunnan Province, into the People’s Republic of China. Drawing from county and prefectural gazetteers, unpublished Party histories of the area, and interviews conducted with Gyalthang residents, this study argues that Tibetans participated in Communist Party campaigns in Gyalthang in the 1950s and 1960s for a variety of ideological, social, and personal reasons. The ways that Tibetans responded to revolutionary activists’ calls for political action shed light on the difficult decisions they made under particularly complex and coercive conditions. Political calculations, revolutionary ideology, youthful enthusiasm, fear, and mob mentality all played roles in motivating Tibetan participants in Mao-era campaigns. The diversity of these Tibetan experiences and the extent of local involvement in state-sponsored attacks on religious leaders and institutions in Gyalthang during the Cultural Revolution have been largely left out of the historiographical record. This dissertation claims that, over the past two decades, the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to control historical memory, the government’s promotion of ethnic tourism in Gyalthang, and elderly Tibetans’ reluctance to discuss their involvement in past atrocities have contributed to the effacement of these diverse Cultural Revolution narratives.Doctor of Philosoph

An evaluation of investor protection in secondary securities markets

This thesis discusses differences in countries' approaches to investor protection regulation and explores the reasons why they exist in the first place as well as why they are likely to persist. I first provide a framework that can explain the need for regulation in financial markets in general and secondary capital markets in particular. Next, taking the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia as case studies, I present descriptive and stylised evidence on regulatory and institutional differences across countries with regards to private enforcement of regulatory duties. Differences in the institutional treatment of those entitled to the regulatory protection as well as what regulatory duties entail are evident. However, the two countries are similar in that they both provide for private enforcement of regulatory duties through a cause of action in tort. An important implication of this finding is that the level of protection provided is unlikely to converge globally, despite efforts to harmonies by the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO). Convergence of the legal protection provided for investors is also unlikely due to persistent differences in tort law around the world. Given an ostensibly strong need for appropriate level of protection for investors, I propose a different way forward that does not require convergence of substantive regulation and enforcement across countries.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo