We carried a bit of news today in the daily briefs about a major victory in the global intellectual property rights battle. Karaoke lounge owners are - perhaps reluctantly! - coming to the rescue of the beleaguered record companies. KTV lounges will have to pay a karaoke copyright fee starting some time later this year. Boybands that have been buried by the sands of time - I’m talking to you, Michael Learns To Rock - rejoice!

Bill Gates may be the world’s most generous philanthropist, but that tag is usually overshadowed by the brickbats hurled his way for dominating our computing life with Microsoft Windows.

Now he’s combining his do-gooding with business with the $3 Microsoft Windows package for developing countries (terms and conditions apply).

At the heart of this is his stated desire to bridge the technology and innovation gap between rich and poor nations.

But, as PC World’s Harry McCracken pointed out, it’s also a delayed reaction to the Linux-ification of the developing world.

China, for example, favors the open-source Linux operating system. Projects like the $100 laptop, aimed at developing countries, run on Linux too.

Microsoft’s ultra-cheap Windows bundle will get students in poor countries hooked on Windows while they’re young and encourage them to continue their habits into adulthood, hopefully before they discover a better operating system.

It will also boost their piracy drive. Microsoft’s popularity in the developing world is aided in large part by enterprising software bootleggers who have made the operating system available to developing countries’ citizens for much less than $3 over the years. Now, Microsoft will at least be able to make some money from markets where they previously earned nothing.

As you may have heard, Google came out with a new Chinese language input method editor, or IME - a device for typing Chinese characters using pinyin romanization. We discovered it here in the office about a week ago and all started trying it out. Personally, I found it annoying, as I only rarely type in Chinese, though Google’s IME assumes that I want to type in Chinese all the time. Even though I set my default language to English (I think), it would automatically switch me back to Chinese every time I toggled between programs (which for me is something like 2-3 times a minute, on average).

Well, I’m not the only one who is annoyed. Chinese search engine Sohu checked out the software and found it oddly familiar to their own IME - they promptly accused Google of stealing their material. Google then came out and apologized for doing just that, basically admitting that they had ripped off Sohu’s technology. “We are willing to face up to our mistake,” Google said.

It now appears that Sohu is going to put them to the test on that. They are preparing a lawsuit to be brought unless Google retracts its software, something Google has said it will not do. Let’s get it on!

Howard French has an interesting article up on Beijing News’s continuing lawsuit against the internet portal Tom.com for posting some 25,000 of its articles and photos without permission over the last few years. He puts the suit in the larger context of the “war” between print and online media: while newspapers have proliferated wildly in China over the last 10 years, internet news services have grown faster, are cheaper and can steal content with ease in an intellectual property “no-man’s land” like China, as he puts it (although, to be fair, Chinese newspapers themselves are far from innocent when it comes to pinching others’ articles).
And so, in honor of this landmark case, I’d like to reproduce the article (but only part of it) in this space without Mr French or the New York Times’ express written consent:

Now, as has happened in the United States and many other countries, with computer usage and broadband access both booming here, newspapers are losing readers — especially among young, prosperous city dwellers — to large corporate-owned Web sites. What set China apart from much of the rest of the world, until recently, was that these Web sites faced no legal obstacles in copying material from newspapers, often wholesale.

“There is a very brutal competition between newspapers, with seven or eight big ones just in Beijing, and now a big new player, the Internet, wants to wipe them all out, to change the landscape,” said Yu Guofu, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property matters.

“The press is leading a hard life and facing an unpleasant future, but it has decided it is better to protect its rights than just sit and wait to die,” Yu said.

According to one recent academic study, newspaper readership in China has declined sharply in the past three years, with the proportion of people who say they read a newspaper at least once a week falling to 22 percent from 26 percent since 2003.

Movie piracy is still rampant in China. This, as the Motion Picture Association will tell you as often as possible, is a significant problem.

In its latest annual study, released this week, the group said that of the US$2.7 billion in potential losses each year resulting from piracy, about half was shouldered by China’s movie industry and less than a quarter by the US industry – since China only allows up to 20 foreign movies for commercial distribution.

Significantly, China’s movie industry has grown to the point where piracy can cost it in excess of a billion dollars. Chinese moviemakers, like members of just about every other profession, are trying to learn as much as they can from outsiders and are always eager to find ways to fit new ideas into old traditions.

The point was highlighted by a friend who teaches at a Hong Kong university. While obviously generalizing a bit, she pointed out that her Hong Kong students are generally uninterested while mainland students are like sponges. They ask questions, stay after class to solve problems and are always eager to learn.

More than any economic advantage and huge market potential, the fact that its people want to know about everything and are not shy about their thirst for knowledge may be China’s trump card.

The space race, the auto industry, high tech; these are all industries in which China has made considerable gains. More are coming, including China’s movie industry. In truth, it is not likely to catch up to Hollywood any time soon but little by little it is growing, asking questions and figuring things out.

Every year Hollywood is a few hundred million dollars short in China. It’s not that the problem is not serious. It is. But it is also part of the process of asking, learning and acquiring new tastes that is helping China and its industries develop into some of the biggest in the world.

This is a classic. Picked up over at Shanghaiist via the Financial Times. Talk about a role reversal. These two articles have basically covered it so I’ll let them speak…

The ongoing intellectual property rights dilemma has taken a bizarre twist. With Hu Jintao’s promise to tighten up IPR protection still hanging in the air and his buddying-up with Bill Gates - a serial victim of Chinese piracy - still fresh in the mind, BlackBerry manufacturer RIM has become the latest scalp in this legal jungle.

BlackBerries - the e-mailing device that makes a corporate executive stand out from the crowd - are set to make their mainstream arrival in China in a few months through a partnership with China Mobile. However, RIM didn’t expect to be beaten to the market by a similar service offered by the other state mobile operator, China Unicom. The name of this rival device? RedBerry. Oh yes.

RedBerry developer Facio Software Inc. doesn’t seem in the least bit bothered by this flagrant exploitation of another company’s brand - in fact it is quite boastful. Proclaiming on its website that “We are the Redberry!”, Facio Software emphasises that its service is available “before RIM’s BlackBerry”. A further comment reads: “The Redberry is not afraid, neither did David fear Goliath!”

Poor RIM - it’s a wealthy mulitnational but it still has rights - appears to have been caught up in a turf war between China Mobile and China Unicom. [Note to foreign investors: try and avoid becoming a bargaining chip in a battle between two hugely influential SOEs.] Speaking to AP, RIM CEO Jim Balsillie said as much:”It’s a strange marketing plan. It’s kind of brazen, this kind of poke in the eye by China Unicom at China Mobile.”

And what can RIM do about this? Nothing. “China has its own gestation cycle and you work with it and you respect it,” Balsillie said. What has it to gain from kicking up a fuss and threatening to withdraw from the China Mobile deal? A move to take the higher moral ground will simply result in lower commercial profits. Like countless companies before it, RIM must bite the bullet, stay standing in the market and hope that IPR protection improves - or the RedBerry bursts - sooner rather than later.