“Amid a crackdown, Chinese knockoffs are threatened. Even as China has become the workshop of the globe, with just about everything seeming to carry a “made in China” label, it has earned another, more dubious honor: the world center of counterfeiting. With factories producing everything from pirated software to knockoff designer clothes, Beijing is notoriously lax in enforcing intellectual-property rights. And when it comes to prospering from other people’s copyrights and patents, few industries can top Chinese manufacturers of DVD players.
In the past few years, their factories have been turning out these machines at a furious pace, exporting more than 10 million in 2001 alone–without paying royalties to the multinationals that own the patents. That has left the likes of Sony, Philips, and AOL Time Warner fuming.”
Click here for the full story at Business Week Magazine’s website.
