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By Ronald Fink
China's efforts to get PC makers to install anti-pornography software on machines sold in that country are unlikely to be stymied by a budding dispute over intellectual property rights to the program, according to legal experts.
Demands by Beijing that computer manufacturers install an Internet-filtering program known as Green Dam have led to charges of piracy by a U.S. maker of similar software, Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara, California. Pieces of Green Dam, made by the Chinese developer Jinhui Computer System Engineering Inc., are identical to those of CyberSitter, a program that Solid Oak has developed, the California company claims.
In response, Solid Oak has sent cease-and-desist letters to Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Gateway and the U.S. subsidiaries of Acer, Lenovo, Sony and Toshiba demanding that they not ship machines loaded with Green Dam, and is considering filing suit to block such action.
But the Chinese government is unlikely to allow the dispute to go to court, intellectual property attorneys say. "I'm fully confident that China won't allow such a trivial matter" to stand in the way of its plans, Helene Gao, an associate in the New York City law firm of Cohen, Pontani, Lieberman & Pavane, said in an interview with CIOZone.
Although Gao noted that Solid Oak seems only to have copyright protection, which requires a holder to do more to prove infringement than a patent does, she said she expected China to readily buy a license from Solid Oak if that would avoid a court battle. She insisted that the government would prefer to escape the publicity that would arise from a lingering dispute.
"It would really look bad" for China not to take a license if there's any merit at all to Solid Oak's claims, said Gao.
In April, the United States Trade Representative put China and Russia at the top of a list of countries with the worst records of preventing piracy and counterfeiting of U.S. goods, the fifth straight year that China topped the list.
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