Intellectual Property and China: Is China Stealing American IP?; Stanford Law School, April 10, 2018

Paul Goldstein, Q&A with Sharon Driscoll, Stanford Law School; Intellectual Property and China: Is China Stealing American IP?

"How do you think this challenge is best addressed? How can China and other countries be made to adhere to IP agreements?

Within the confines of trade, that’s a hard question. A friend who oversaw IP policy for the USTR several administrations ago once commented to me that people thought of the USTR as John Wayne rushing into dens of IP iniquity, six-shooters ablaze, when the reality was that he was Archie Bunker shooting off nothing more than his mouth. The US and other countries have achieved important successes under the World Trade Organization’s TRIPs Agreement [Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights] with a dispute resolution process that is far more deliberate than the 301 process. But, although many sober voices have argued for this as the preferable route, it’s far from clear that TRIPs will cover all of the forms of IP appropriation that are the object of the current 301 process, or that the current administration has the will or the patience to follow this avenue. And there are other trade alternatives, such as a bilateral investment treaty with China that could draw on the IP provisions of the so-called TRIPs-Plus free trade agreements with other countries.

Paul Goldstein is the Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. A globally recognized expert on intellectual property law, Paul Goldstein is the author of an influential five-volume treatise on U.S. copyright law and a one-volume treatise on international copyright law."

A misguided attempt to “defend trade secrets”; Washington Post, 12/2/15

David Post, Washington Post; A misguided attempt to “defend trade secrets” :

"Along with 41 colleagues, I recently joined a letter submitted to the Committee opposing DTSA in which we tried to point out some of the ways in which putting this weapon in the hands of trade secret owners is likely to backfire, becoming a “strategic weapon” that will be used mostly for anti-competitive purposes that have nothing to do with preventing “cyber-espionage.” [A more detailed critique of the ex parte seizure provisions can be found in this article by Eric Goldman, one of the authors of the law professors’ letter]

It is often difficult, when considering intellectual property law, to see the downside of proposals meant to strengthen legal protection (while relatively easy to see the upside). Trade secret law has profound effects on employee mobility; the vast majority of trade secret litigation in this country involves employees moving from one company to another (and allegedly taking their former employer’s trade secrets with them). The DTSA will have little or no effect on Chinese government agents, but it is likely to have a deeper and much more lasting effect on the health of the labor market in this country, and not for the better."