At some point in the spring of 2008 my fellow would-be Asia-based members of the global business elite and I attended a lecture by a guy visiting our institution from a British business association (Chamber of Commerce or some such thing) based in China. He had plenty to say, and forgetting the usual technical difficulties that seem to plague universities and professors whenever a PowerPoint presentation rears its ugly head, much of it was of interest. What particularly caught my attention was his explanation of the many problems faced by Western companies operating in China in terms of copyrights and trademarks. Despite improvements in laws and regulations, he explained, problems still abound. An extreme example being that someone could register their rights over, for example, the name or product of any company prior to its coming to China and then proceed to operate a business under that name. Put simply, imagine that before Starbucks set up shop in China I registered the name and trademarks, and all the various iterations of them possible in Chinese ideographs, and set up a chain of my own Starbucks coffee shops across the country. By the time the real Starbucks arrived they’d have a hard time fighting me as I would have already been operating under the name and had the rights and chain of shops to prove it. Crazy maybe, but I still lay awake at nights thinking about which name I can steal in order to make my fortune in China and set myself up as modern day Tai-Pan.

A Japan Times article of a few weeks ago covered an interesting, amusing, and no doubt for the parties concerned worrying occurrence in China whereby Chinese were attempting (and in some cases succeeding) in copyrighting and using as trademarks the names of Japanese celebrities. The name of Hamasaki Ayumi, a pop singer, has been registered as a trademark by a company in Guangdong province as a stationary brand and in Hunan province as the name of a fitness club. Applications have also been made for the name of venerable Japanese actor Takakura Ken (How dare they!) Isn’t capitalism with socialist characteristics great?

Image courtesy of HamovHotov.com