Essential reading on intellectual property
Rebecca Ordish and Alan Adcock start where most other writers of business books on China leave off. In China Intellectual Property Challenges and Solutions, they go beyond the oft trotted-out truisms that the mainland is the wild west of intellectual property rights protection to reveal ways that businesspeople can safeguard and respond to infringements of their intangible assets.
That is not to say there is not a problem with intellectual property rights on the mainland. The regulatory system is young, public awareness of the concept is low and the appetite for cheap copies is high. But, equally, according to Ordish and Adcock, offshore and domestic companies neglected to put intellectual property on their agenda in the rush to get a toehold in the world's biggest market.
Many firms sent in staff with little understanding of the issue, did not get good advice, focused on the short term and more or less did nothing to prevent theft in the workplace.
To remedy the situation, the authors identify steps companies can take from sourcing, to recruiting, partnerships and processing. Visit suppliers, specify who should go on a site trip, confirm a job candidate's qualifications and register domain names, they say. This can also pay dividends elsewhere such as in quality control, another area in which China's reputation has taken a battering over the past year or so.
Should these steps fail and some type of infringement occur, the authors explore the art of the possible in the mainland's legal system. Here, too, prevention can ease the pain of cure if companies can establish things such as 'evidence banks' cataloguing promotional materials, partnership agreements and product samples.
While court cases such as the long-running battle between Italian chocolate giant Ferrero Rocher and its nutty clone generate the greatest publicity of the enforcement options there are other less cumbersome ways of arming against infringers. These methods mainly rely on the ability to think creatively and to understand the priorities of the relevant government agencies.
The authors are upfront that there are no easy answers. They suggest that protecting intellectual property is not something any one person in an operation can solve and that it takes effort from accountants skilled in audits to sales agents on alert for fakes to ensure core intangible assets remain in company hands. Managers and business owners should have an idea of the questions they should be asking and a general idea of the response they should receive.
The book also leaves the reader with the sense that compliance with the system and knowledge of regulatory options will be rewarded. It is a shift that seems to be occurring across the mainland, from tax return filing to labour contracts, as mainland authorities seek to consolidate the legitimate economy.
If the book does lack anything, it is a chapter-length case study of how one company covered all the bases. But, otherwise it is one case where the sub heading 'an essential business guide' is well deserved.
Now, time to head over to the DVD shop before it closes - for good.
