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Efforts Ramping Up to Weed Out Software Piracy in China

By Stephanie Robinson

The Chinese government and software stakeholders in China appear to be strengthening their attention to the problem of unlicensed software use. On November 30, 2010, the Chinese government announced that it would be inspecting all central and local government computers during 2010 and 2011 to ensure that all departments are using only properly licensed software. That announcement followed a six-month national campaign by the Chinese government to crack down on the production and distribution of pirated content. In addition, Microsoft recently announced that it had filed a lawsuit against 10 companies in China for selling computers with unlicensed versions of Windows and other products pre-installed, which came on the heels of the software giant?s recent victory in a lawsuit it filed against a chain of Internet cafe businesses in China that used pirated software. Finally, in a series of meetings on December 1, 2010, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and many of its members met with Obama administration officials to outline proposals for a new trade strategy with China intended to open up that market to software publishers whose efforts there have been crippled by widespread piracy. Those proposals include:

• Working to increase U.S. software exports to China by 50 percent in two years;
• Requiring the development and implementation of a system to ensure that stakeholders meet their commitments for legalization; and
• Requiring the development and implementation of legal tools to curb piracy;
• Dispensing with certain Chinese polices that often require foreign firms wanting to conduct business in China to transfer intellectual property to Chinese companies.

The problem of unlicensed software use in China generally is much more significant than what we see in the U.S. and Europe. As the Chinese economy grows and develops in coming years, it will be interesting to see how software publishers, industry groups like the BSA, and the Chinese government implement enforcement programs and how those programs might have an effect on copyright laws in Asia and elsewhere.

Full post as published by Business and Technology Law on December 10, 2010 (boomark / email).