Until recently, it wasn’t unusual to hear company executives and lawyers rail against China as a country of copy-cats and counterfeiters. Their China policies focused almost exclusively on how to stop the countless number of fake goods and knockoffs that infringed their trademarks and copyrights. And they wondered out loud, repeatedly, whether China would ever develop its own culture of innovation and a respect for IP.
Today, the perception of the Asian colossus has changed. Counterfeiting is still a problem, but lawyers are learning how to deal with it. More importantly, they consider the attitude toward IP in China—for copyright, trademark and patent infringement—to have vastly improved.
