Look out product pirates!
June 19, 2006 by SwizStick
Filed under Contract Logistics, Education, QuickNews, Supply Chain Management
The EU and US are combining forces in a major effort to fight piracy:
The U.S. and European Union will pledge this week to crack down on counterfeit goods such as pharmaceuticals, perfume and pirated software from China and Russia, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said.
International companies are losing more than $60 billion a year because of piracy in China, according to the U.S. government. China has repeatedly promised to improve protection of intellectual property rights, which the EU’s Chamber of Commerce in Beijing has said is one of the biggest concerns of its more than 700 members.
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The joint EU-U.S. accord, which includes coordinating information and working more closely with industry, will be signed tomorrow and discussed June 21 in Vienna when the commission meets with President George W. Bush. Efforts to battle piracy will concentrate initially on China and Russia, with the rest of Asia, the Middle East and Africa to follow, Mandelson said.
(emphasis ours)
As anyone who has spent any considerable time shopping or doing business in China knows, pirated goods on everything from movies and music to CPUs and other technology are widely available. As Chinalawblog pointed out today, many things can go wrong outsourcing to China. The stories of companies outsourcing manufacturing to China only to find out that the very company they outsourced too has copied their mold or technology and is now manufacturing and selling the product in direct competition to their company are too many to mention.
It remains to be seen how successful the US and EU will be in combating piracy. Certainly they have the financial resources to do so, but they have a long, tough road ahead of them as the real solution lies in eliminating the endemic corruption in piracy plagued markets such as China and Russia.
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