The backlash from China, over those complaints made by US officials to the World Trade Organization last week, has already begun, with statements from Chinese officials, filtering through Reuters, saying that this will harm and hinder efforts to crack down on piracy.
Reuters cites Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi saying that “This will have an utterly negative impact and will inevitably badly damage bilateral intellectual property cooperation and it flies in the face of the agreement between the two countries’ leaders to propose dialogue as a way of settling disputes.”
Airing dirty linen in public, especially where it uses newspaper reporting, is not one of the Western traditions that China has taken to its heart, but on the other hand there has been a lot of official noise of late about changing laws in China, and some about actually enforcing them.
China said it will implement 14 new laws on intellectual property but just to foster a sense of irony Reuters also reported that copies of Spider-Man 3 have already surfaced on the streets of Beijing nearly two weeks prior to it being released.
Last week Faultline argued that the US campaign was largely saber rattling and that China has to get to the heart of its own corruption problems before it can tackle entertainment piracy, since it’s tough to get a police official who is taking bribes to arrest the street trader that is bribing him.