I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

In our experience in China, basically there is no privacy at all – that is why China is far behind the world in important respects: even though it has become so rich, it trails behind in terms of passion, imagination and creativity.

When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That's dangerous for human development.

In the Soviet Union before, in China today, and even in the US, officials always think what they do is necessary, and firmly believe they do what is best for the state and the people. But the lesson that people should learn from history is the need to limit state power.

If a government is elected by the people, and is genuinely working for the people, they should not give in to these temptations.

Despite that fact, the European Commission's Home Affairs department made the following reply to the journalist David Meyer when he asked them for a statement of the latest revelations:

We do not have any comments. This is an internal U.S. matter.

Another European asking questions is Peter Schaar, Germany's federal commissioner for data protection, who told David Meyer the following:

Given the large number of German users of Google, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft services, I expect the German government... is committed to clarification and limitation of surveillance.

Some want to go further than simply strengthening data protection in Europe. The European privacy advocate, Alexander Hanff, is calling for the US's "safe harbor" status to be revoked. Here's why that matters:

The European Commission's Directive on Data Protection went into effect in October of 1998, and would prohibit the transfer of personal data to non-European Union countries that do not meet the European Union (EU) "adequacy" standard for privacy protection. While the United States and the EU share the goal of enhancing privacy protection for their citizens, the United States takes a different approach to privacy from that taken by the EU.

In order to bridge these differences in approach and provide a streamlined means for U.S. organizations to comply with the Directive, the U.S. Department of Commerce in consultation with the European Commission developed a "Safe Harbor" framework and this website to provide the information an organization would need to evaluate -- and then join -- the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor program.

Mind you, however bad the situation is in Europe, President Obama can take comfort from the fact that it could be worse:

Peng Liyuan, the wife of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, appears to have an iPhone. And now, according to reports, US intelligence agencies may be spying on iPhone users through a secret data harvesting program. Does that mean there’s a possibility that the US is spying on the private messages of China’s first lady?

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Recommend to Congress and the administration that U.S. funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) program budget in whole or in part be withheld until (1) the WHO’s process of certifying national regulatory agencies includes attestation that IP protection is an essential part of the regulatory evaluation process, and (2) the WHO refrains from prequalifying any product until the regulating agency of jurisdiction demonstrates and certifies that it does not violate IP rights...

The U.S. government has leverage at the WHO chiefly because of its financial support, which consists of annual “means tested” contributions to the WHO’s program budget and “voluntary” contributions whose total value is about $350 million. This support from the United States can be a carrot or a stick to influence the WHO’s actions.

Multilateral coordination may also be possible. For example, the IP of Japanese-developed medicine is frequently stolen, and Japan’s current annual and voluntary contributions to the WHO total over $70 million.

The Commission believes this recommendation has strong promise but is not ready to endorse it. To be acted upon, this recommendation requires careful assessment of the likely impacts and the potential for unintended consequences. It will be essential to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable across the world continue to have access to life-saving, high-quality health interventions, now and in the future. In fact, IP protections are vital to that outcome, because they preserve incentives for innovation and foster predictable markets for manufacturers.

Katzenberg has said he wants nothing, personally or professionally, in exchange for his support of the president, and DreamWorks' DC agenda is hard to glean: The studio has no lobbyists and is not part of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Obama officials say they respect Katzenberg not only for his fundraising, but also because he has no specific "ask"—no ambassadorship to Switzerland, no regulatory tweak, no nights in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Obama takes Katzenberg's calls, and he and his political adviser, Andy Spahn, visited the White House almost 50 times between them during Obama's first term. (Not all of Spahn's visits had to do with Katzenberg.) It has also left him well positioned to advocate for his industry's and his company's interests in China's booming film market.

Adds Paul Begala: "Every Democrat who has presidential ambitions is now going to beat a path straight for Jeffrey's door. Or they're too dumb to be president."

Yet it is hard to deny that he—along with Hollywood as a whole—has benefited from his connections. In the 2012 fiscal-cliff fight, for instance, the White House insisted Congress preserve a $430 million tax break for film studios that keep production jobs in the United States.

In July 2011, ahead of a trade visit to China, Vice President Joe Biden met with industry leaders who asked him to press their case. Biden, too, returned empty-handed. Seven months later, Xi Jinping, then China's leader-in-waiting, made his first official visit to America. On hand to greet him was Katzenberg, who scored a seat next to Xi at a State Department luncheon.

Later that week, Xi and Biden traveled to Los Angeles, and Katzenberg joined them for lunch with Gov. Brown. Biden spent the day pushing Xi on the film quota and profit sharing disputes. The White House wanted to bump the studios' portion from 13 percent to 27 percent, but as the negotiations intensified, Biden asked Katzenberg and Disney CEO Bob Iger what they could live with. Then Biden made Xi a new offer: 25 percent. Xi agreed, and he also said China would let in 14 more foreign-made 3-D and IMAX movies each year.

Katzenberg was simultaneously working on a $350 million deal to open Oriental DreamWorks, a new animation studio in Shanghai—and it couldn't happen without Xi's approval. That same day, at a US-China economic forum held at a downtown LA hotel, Katzenberg officially unveiled the project—and proudly announced that it now bore Xi's personal endorsement.

Recommend that Congress and the administration impose a tariff on all Chinese-origin imports, designed to raise 150% of all U.S. losses from Chinese IP theft in the previous year, as estimated by the secretary of commerce. This tariff would be subject to modification by the president on national security grounds.

The argument for this proposal is that only by seriously limiting the U.S. market for Chinese goods and services will sufficient incentive be created for Chinese authorities to systematically reduce IP theft. The method proposed to accomplish that goal is to impose the calibrated tariff just described.

While such action would allow retaliation, the huge Chinese trade surplus with the United States could cause the retaliation to be ineffective. Chinese exports to the United States are between three and four times the dollar value of U.S. exports to China.

The Commission is not prepared to make such a recommendation now because of the difficulty of estimating the value of stolen IP, the difficulty of identifying the appropriate imports, and the many legal questions raised by such an action under the United States’ WTO obligations. If major IP theft continues or increases, however, the proposal should be further refined and considered.

The second, and more fundamental, effect is that IP theft is undermining both the means and the incentive for entrepreneurs to innovate, which will slow the development of new inventions and new industries that can further expand the world economy and continue to raise the prosperity of all. This effect has received some attention in the cases of a few industries, but it affects others as well. Unless current trends are reversed, there is a risk of the relative stagnation of innovation, with adverse consequences for both developed and developing countries.

On an unprecedented level, a critical driver of this worldwide economic growth is in trouble. Trade secrets, patents, copyrights, and trademarks are being stolen, especially from American but also from European, Japanese, and other nations’ companies and organizations

Effects on industry. Lost sales; lost brand value; reduced scope of operations; lost jobs and reduced ability to provide employee benefits; reduced ability to conduct R&D; increased IP protection expenses for prevention, remediation, and enforcement; increased costs from dealing with malware acquired from unlicensed software; reduced incentive to innovate.

Effects on consumers. Harm to health, harm to safety, costs incurred as a result of product failure, decreased or increased purchasing power.

Designate the national security advisor as the principal policy coordinator for all actions on the protection of American IP.

"What we found was the attackers were actually looking for the accounts that we had lawful wiretap orders on," Aucsmith says. "So if you think about this, this is brilliant counter-intelligence. You have two choices: If you want to find out if your agents, if you will, have been discovered, you can try to break into the FBI to find out that way. Presumably that's difficult. Or you can break into the people that the courts have served paper on and see if you can find it that way. That's essentially what we think they were trolling for, at least in our case."

Defenders of the FBI proposal tend to pooh-pooh security concerns raised about requirisng such backdoors: Our brilliant American programmers, they assert, will find ways to enable wiretapping without creating new vulnerabilities. But if a company like Google, with its massive financial resources and a stable of some of the smartest coders anywhere, can be victimized in this way, how realistic is it to expect thousands of Internet startups to achieve better security?

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CCTV recently used a Jon Stewart clip to lay into the U.S. over the Guantanamo Bay political stalemate. As SCMP [South China Morning Post] points out, state television's attempt to poke fun at the U.S. with Stewart backfired online in China, with people saying that CCTV was being hypocritical and missing the irony.

"There are so many problems happening domestically that you choose not to broadcast every day, but instead choose to smell the farts of other countries," one Chinese commenter wrote in video's comment section.

"This is our country's mainstream media... They just want to divert our attention to problems [of other countries] away from poisonous ginger, tainted milk, gutter oil and undrinkable tap water," quipped another.

Job Title: Chief Pornographic Identification Officer
Work Location: Beijing
Compensation: 200,000 RMB (US$32,300) yearly
Job Description: Rapid Determination of Adult Sites

Requirements:
1)   Must be familiar with the standard of adult content from around the world
2)   Must be familiar with China’s law standards regarding adult content, familiar with documented regulations
3)   Must be familiar with the standards for adult content on China’s internet and it’s service providers
4)   Regardless of gender, must be college graduate from 25-35 years old
5)   Must have a strong sense of responsibility and work well in a team

The security company who put this job advert out, Anquan Lianmeng (League of Security) said that they received thousands of applications within two days of posting. Many of which had come in from outside of the country. It’s no surprise considering the description.

The app, "jingdian shucheng", offered access to ten books via the iPhone and iPad. Mr Hao said he believed three titles by Wang Lixiong, a political writer and activist, had prompted the ban, according to The Financial Times. Mr Wang is a prominent critic of Chinese policy in Tibet.

Concern over Apple’s weakness in the booming Chinese smartphone market has been seen by investors as a potential problem for its continued growth. It has been a major cause of a share price slump in recent months that has forced Mr Cook to repeatedly defend his strategy. The firm has been repeatedly rumoured to be developing a cheaper iPhone designed to court Chinese consumers but it has not yet revealed its plans.

According to the US International Trade Commission, Chinese intellectual property theft cost the United States $48 billion in 2009, as well as taking away 2 million jobs. Since then, the amount of theft has worsened, so the total loss is likely around $300 billion. But US companies, afraid that making their losses public will shake consumer confidence, won’t go public with their outrage.

Until now, this problem of junk patents has been confined to China, and the companies that operate there. But last year China went even further with its subsidy system, offering to pay the fees for filing overseas, presumably to encourage Chinese companies to build up patent portfolios in foreign markets that can be used for defensive or even offensive purposes. We're now beginning to see the effects of this further distortion to the patent system, as Australian businesses struggle with the flood of new patents there. The Patentology blog explains:

A Chinese government scheme providing financial incentives for small and medium sized enterprises, public institutions or scientific research institutions appears to be resulting in abuse of the Australian patent system, and the 'dumping' of numerous low-quality innovation patents on the Australian Register.

These 'junk' patents are not being examined or certified. They therefore represent no more than potential enforceable rights. Even so, they generate costs to companies operating legitimately in Australia, which may need to obtain advice on the likely scope and validity of these patents in order to avoid possible infringement. In extreme cases, the existence of junk patents could result in an Australian business choosing not to take the risk of bringing a new product to market, even though the Chinese owner of a patent is not itself offering any products or services in this country.

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It concerns the WeChat app from the Chinese company Tencent, which has started to gain users in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. But as Tech In Asia now reports:

the Chinese name of the outspoken magazine caught up in a tense struggle of wills with the government -- Southern Weekend in English, nan fang zhou mo in Chinese -- is censored in Chinese on WeChat. But it's not just restricted to users in China (where the app is called Weixin), and typing that name in the Chinese language is now blocked globally.

In any case, this is a clear straw in the wind. China's Internet companies are now so big and successful in their home market that it is only natural for them to look to expand overseas. I'm sure that at first they will be very reluctant to censor material there to avoid drawing the ire of digital rights groups and local governments; but at some point something will crop up that is sufficiently problematic for them as Chinese companies that they will feel compelled to act in order to safeguard their relations with the government in China, which will remain their priority.

Of course, the West can hardly claim the moral high ground here, since it, too, is censoring material. It's just that different governments take exception to different things, and react with differing degrees of severity against those who flout their laws. Unfortunately, the end-result of Chinese Net companies expanding overseas is likely to be double censorship – one imposed by local authorities, and the other flowing from China.

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In order to reinforce those claims, most of the countries listed above have stationed a few military personnel on a few of the larger islands. Recently, China has come up with a novel way of bolstering its position:

In the ongoing dispute over the Spratly Islands claimed by China and Vietnam, the latest development is that China is opening up 3G services on the islands, not only to Chinese soldiers but also for the country's fishermen.

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Beijing Eedoo successfully launched a multimedia entertainment console in the mainland market in April last year. But the company has changed the product name several times in order to avoid sensitive issues.

Jack Luo, chief executive officer of Beijing Eedoo, insisted his company is selling a "sports and entertainment machine", rather than a game console, to Chinese families.

Rumors have circulated in the Chinese media that some international companies have already sensed the government's changing attitude. They hope to figure out the Chinese authorities' intentions so they can make a rapid response, analysts said.

 

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), a subsidiary responsible for Sony's PlayStation business, set up a branch in South China's Guangdong province in June last year. The Guangdong branch will conduct training and research and development work for Sony.

 

Microsoft introduced its Kinect, a controller-free game console, to the Chinese mainland in October last year. However, Zhang Yaqin, chairman of Microsoft Corp's Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group, said Kinect is not used for games in China but for other purposes, such as medical treatment and education.

Building on an existing JCCT commitment to develop a Judicial Interpretation making clear that those who facilitate online infringement will be jointly liable for such infringement, China announced that its Supreme People’s Court will publish a Judicial Interpretation on Internet Intermediary Liability before the end of 2012.

For good cause, existing secondary liability law... does not extend to facilitation – it requires more knowing, culpable conduct, or direct financial benefit. A pirate's utility company arguably facilitates piracy by providing electric power to the pirate – and indeed, benefits from the added electricity consumed. We don't penalize utilities for piracy committed by their customers, however: since its inception, secondary liability has been wisely limited exclude such sweeping application.

The term seems particularly inappropriate in relation to commitments extracted from China regarding Internet policy. Construed broadly, "facilitate" could encapsulate any website or web service that allows users to communicate information freely. Given the ambiguity of the term, China could potentially interpret the word broadly to engage in censorship of its own, not only for IP infringement offenses, but for other activities "illegal" in China as well. If censorship concerns were sufficiently problematic in the U.S., they should be at least as problematic in China.

What's significant here is that this building piracy can be seen as part of a new trend -- the rise of a high-speed cut-and-paste approach to urban design based around architectural mashups:

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who designed Beijing's surreal, next-generation CCTV tower, has stated the super-speed expansion of Chinese cities is producing architects who use laptops to quickly cut and paste buildings into existence. Koolhaas, in the book "Mutations," calls these architects Photoshop designers: "Photoshop allows us to make collages of photographs -- (and) this is the essence of (China's) architectural and urban production…. Design today becomes as easy as Photoshop, even on the scale of a city."

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Frustrated by his adult son's incessant gaming habit, a man in China reportedly hired a number of in-game master "hitmen" to annihilate his son's avatar over and over again in an attempt to deter him from playing.

Quoting China's Sanqin Daily, Kotaku reports that the fed-up father, identified only as "Mr. Feng," decided to embark on this cyber murder plot as his son seemed incapable of pulling himself away from the computer long enough to find a job.

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With respect to the Plaintiff being able to prove the statements false, the Plaintiff has a couple of insurmountable problems. First and foremost, the case boils down to two allegedly defamatory statements.

1) The Plaintiff (falsely) claims that the Defendant called her a “prostitute.” ... However, the record clearly reflects that the Defendant did no such thing.... In fact, the claim that she is a “prostitute” seems to have only been uttered by third parties, including Plaintiff's own counsel....

2) The Defendant (correctly) claims that Plaintiff was not permitted to leave China during a certain period of time....

With respect to the first statement, the record clearly reflects that this interpretation of the defendants’ statements is a fabrication. The Defendant, at worst, implied that Zhang Ziyi had wealthy boyfriends who lavished her with expensive gifts.... Given her public persona, and the fact that she is frequently unabashed about sharing her affections with wealthy paramour after wealthy paramour, this is almost certainly a given. Zhang Ziyi’s conduct could be less-than-charitably described as “gold-digging” ..., but it is a far cry from “prostitution.” If Ms. Ziyi intends to prove that she has never received any largesse or gifts from her series of wealthy boyfriends, then this will be an interesting trial to say the least.

As to the second statement, one must wonder what would be defamatory about claiming that a Chinese national found her travel privileges to be temporarily restricted. Given that the Chinese government is one of the most totalitarian regimes in the world, anyone prohibited from leaving the country would find themselves in good company, if not among some international heroes.... Even if the statement was held to have a defamatory meaning, and the defendant uttered the statements complained of, the plaintiff would still run into a legal impossibility – overcoming the actual malice standard in order for her case to survive.

When the defendant moved to strike this case under CCP 425.16, the Plaintiff immediately took steps to start an expensive and relentless discovery campaign. Mr. Meng was deposed three times. Mr. Meng produced reams of documents. The Plaintiff conducted three expert depositions. Throughout all of this, the Plaintiff has not produced one shred of evidence that Meng’s statements were false. Even if she were to somehow do so, mere falsity is not enough: she must also prove that Meng harbored serious doubts about the accuracy of his published information and recklessly disregarded the truth. Nevertheless, the Plaintiff’s discovery campaign has done nothing more than create a rock-solid record that the Plaintiff could never overcome her legal burden. The Plaintiff has, in an effort to run up the bill on the Defendant, managed to disprove her own case so solidly, that the “reasonable possibility” standard was left behind long ago.

Plaintiff Zhang Ziyi is an international celebrity with means that far exceed those of Defendant Watson Meng.... A $200,000 bond will not deprive her of access to the courts, and will likely not even cover the costs of litigation. The Plaintiff does not reside in California, and in fact, resides in a country where the Defendant is persona non grata.... If this court were to grant a fee award to Defendant, he would not likely find justice if he attempted to enforce that award in a country whose government considers him to be a thorn in their side, and where there is no independent judiciary....

Because she does not reside in the State of California, Plaintiff should be required to post an undertaking so that Meng may be assured of recouping his fees and costs following the hearing on the Motion to Strike.... The purpose of Section 1030 is to ensure that a fee award against an out of state plaintiff is not difficult to collect, or fully illusory. The facts of this particular case are probably the most extreme example of the necessity of an undertaking under Section 1030. The Plaintiff is a mega-millionaire with unlimited means; the defendant is all but impecunious; and the defendant would have no reasonable way to collect a fee award, as the plaintiff would be able to simply hide behind a border that the defendant cannot cross. If there was a case that called for a 1030 undertaking, this is it.

Yesterday, Reuters news service ran an article about a rating of eleven countries based on their enforcement of intellectual property rights. The index was prepared at the behest of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by a group called The Global Intellectual Property Center, and it ranks the U.S. at the top of the list in terms of strong IP protection (23.73 points on a scale from 0 – 25). But what is interesting is who scored lowest (out of the eleven countries that were ranked). The four “worst” countries for providing the strong IP protection important to the Chamber of Commerce were the four countries known as BRIC — Brazil, India, Russia and China.

So what else do we know about these four nations? In fact, why were they originally grouped together under the acronym BRIC? The answer is that the term was coined because these four countries were the fastest growing emerging economies, showing growth rates between 5 and 9 percent in their gross domestic products (compared with US growth averaging 3.2 over the past 65 years). The source of these averages for the BRIC nations is this report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, dated February 2012, which contains this conclusion: “We expect the BRIC economies to continue to drive world economic growth in 2012.”

So the four countries driving economic growth are also the four countries with the weakest IP protection regimes, amongst those 11 rated by the Chamber of Commerce report. Doesn’t the conclusion seem simple, that weaker IP enforcement is part of the picture for economic growth?

[I]P protection is, at least a double edged sword. Piracy can reduce revenues, but it also helps to create distribution channels and grow markets. So creative industries seeking to grow in the digital economy need to do more than try, futilely, to eradicate piracy, they need to seek ways to shape their markets and their marketing to exploit the audiences that it can create.

So, slippery as such conclusions can be, I feel comfortable with these two assertions. First, creative people and creative industries can thrive without strong IP protections. In fact, if you are continually looking to the government to increase IP enforcement on your behalf, your industry is probably already in bad trouble. Second, it is perfectly possible to over-enforce IP rights to the point where creativity and economic growth are stifled. There is good evidence that the US has passed that point, and the example of the BRIC nations should suggest to us that we need to reverse our course.