High Court Orders British Telecom to Block Pirate Link Portal

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14322957

A sign of things to come? The horse has obviously bolted with respect to the music industry, but will judgements such as this aid other industries, i.e. film, in the years to come?

J

Protecting IP is important for balance of trade between west and developing countries. Theft of IP is still so rampant in China that they just discovered a fake Apple Store operating over there... now that takes cohones. While China is slowly improving as their local industry develops their own IP they want protected.

Seriously theft of movies, computer software, and music is very large dollar amounts, and hard to not take seriously.

JR

JohnRoberts said:

Seriously theft of movies, computer software, and music is very large dollar amounts, and hard to not take seriously.

JR

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Yes, but hitting the little guy is not the way to put a stop to it. You need to shut down the host server.

Cheers

Ian

> Theft of IP is still so rampant in China

There is no "Theft of IP in China" because using IP of non-Chinese creators is perfectly legal.

There were several "fake Apple stores". Some are still open. Two were closed for lack of a local business license, not for the nature of their business.

China is old and yet young in many ways. As the comsumers become more brand-savvy, they will be shopping for more-legit outlets for high-profile brands, while also being open to cheaper outlets.

for such a huge operation it must be to do something like this, you'd think they'd have ONE guy that speaks decent english...

fake Apple store

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This was (mis)reported in Britain too.

Just coming up to the end of a six month tour of Asia, I can tell you there's one of these stores in every mall in Indonesia, Thailand, China etc.

The stores claim they're official resellers.  That's as far as the 'fake' goes.  The goods however are genuine; a fact that the British media overlooked when reporting this, including the one in Kunming, Yunnan that was featured in the news reports.

OT I know, but this is a great example of creating a meaningless story out of thin air, and it gets my goat.

With regard to the original post, I've expected that newsnet woupd be the next thing for a crackdown for a while.  Most serious fike sharers migrated to this system of downloading from torrents some time ago

PRR said:

> Theft of IP is still so rampant in China

There is no "Theft of IP in China" because using IP of non-Chinese creators is perfectly legal.

There were several "fake Apple stores". Some are still open. Two were closed for lack of a local business license, not for the nature of their business.

China is old and yet young in many ways. As the comsumers become more brand-savvy, they will be shopping for more-legit outlets for high-profile brands, while also being open to cheaper outlets.

Click to expand...

My understanding is that it is illegal but not widely enforced. Culturally it is considered clever to copy and benefit from the work of others, while high profile enforcement actions do occur, probably for show.

I saw a recent overview of Chinese originated patents. While there are hundreds of thousands of local filings most are for small incremental improvements, with very few innovative groundbreaking developments. This too may be a cultural issue and artifact of rote learning that will take time to evolve beyond. China has a long tradition (ancient in fact) of invention and innovation so I would not underestimate what they are ultimately capable of.

JR