Smoke and Mirrors! What a difference a day makes. Guess who showed up to the party late?

Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner assailed China’s long-standing policy of demanding intellectual property from companies that seek to produce products in China. China has aggressively demanded that if American businesses want to sell in China, they have to manufacture in China, and if you produce in China you have to surrender your technology. Is this the root of the evil?

Piracy and counterfeiting of American intellectual property in China has had heavy consequences! The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property reported China’s attack on United States has lead to damages in excess of 300 billion dollars a year. Moreover, fifty to eighty percent of IP theft and seventy percent of the world’s counterfeit goods are attributed to China.

It is very interesting that now the Chinese government through its top legislature, The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), is pushing for a surge in intellectual property registration and is implementing new patent laws. Zhang Mao, China’s director from the State Administration for Industry & Commerce (SAIC), has downplayed the recent surge in intellectual property registrations amounting to over 8 million registrations to date. China’s position is that the changes to its patent laws are meant to streamline registration, and improve protection of intellectual property ideas in China. Is China's latest strategy a way to use patents as an economic weapon?

As you peel back the layers it appears China’s agenda is to use intellectual property laws to monopolize the intellectual property landscape. The cache of intellectual property registrations China is squirreling away is nothing more than an elaborate mechanism to collect revenue and place huge innovation hurdles in the path of foreign competitors. I don’t think China’s latest endeavors are about innovation and safeguarding intellectual property akin to Thomas Jefferson’s vision 200 years ago, when he laid the foundation of patent law as the director of the 1st U.S. Patent Board.

I believe that China will continue to ignore intellectual property rights whenever it believes it will be advantageous to their local economy. The “Billion-Dollar” question is how does the average inventor or American business with great ideas cure the conundrum between protecting an idea and profiting from their innovation on foreign soil?

William Taylor, Associate Editor of Business & Technology

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