Results tagged “Jeffery Atik”

By Professor Jeffery Atik

Among the many changes to the international IP landscape wrought by the WTO's TRIPS Agreement was the unprecedented mandate to impose criminal liability for the most egregious acts of trademark and copyright infringement. Criminal sanctions add to civil and administrative remedies to create a climate of observation of IP rights throughout the WTO space. In anticipation of its joining the WTO -- and in response to pressure from the United States -- China amended its domestic criminal law to provide for the possibility of imprisonment or fines in certain instances of IP infringement as a complement to civil and administrative remedies. Nonetheless, there remains continuing concern held by IP holders about the effectiveness of China's IP enforcement. Much of the current 'TRIPS-plus' program (including the discarded ACTA and the emerging Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP]) is intended to indirectly influence China with regard to IP enforcement.

In 2007, the U.S. brought a three-prong challenge to China's IP system within the WTO dispute settlement system. The central part of the dispute involved a U.S. assertion that China failed to give full effect to the TRIPS criminalization mandate. Article 61 of TRIPS obligates WTO members to provide "for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at least in cases of wilful trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy on a commercial scale."

By Professor Jeffery Atik

In the preface to A Capitalism for the People, Luigi Zingales recounts his departure from an Italian university for the wonderland of American academia. Here merit, neither contacts nor obsequious devotion to one's supervisor, is the key to success and Zingales' triumphs. He becomes an admired professor at the University of Chicago business school, a place he praises for its openness, its devotion to excellence and its rejection of status-based primacy (pity the poor dean, newly arrived from Stanford, who is devastated by the slashing comments of a junior colleague).

But the broader America he sees around him does not match -- in aim or reach -- what Zingales finds at Chicago. Zingales returns to the theme developed in his earlier writing: the United States is burdened with crony capitalism, the same social disease he sought to escape in emigrating from Italy. American business -- and American politics -- is dominated by corrupt elites who prefer protection and status quo to competition and innovation. Zingales introduces a neat distinction -- America remains pro-business, but it is no longer pro-market. And so Zingales seeks to reintroduce and reinvigorate competition in American economic and political life.

Zingales invites us to revive American populism -- and by this he intends the trust-busting populism of Theodore Roosevelt and not the proto-fascism of Huey Long nor the toxic nativism of the KKK. The focus is returning prosperity to the common American, and not further enriching Wall Street, Pharma, agriculture, government contractors, and the greater bulk of big business. Yet his populism is capitalist at heart. If the ties between government and business can be broken, new and vital businesses will thrive. Political life will improve as well, if the distortions and distractions introduced by lobbyists can be pruned back.

By Professor Jeffery Atik

Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail is a thrilling read. It proposes answers to grand questions: Why are some nations rich? Why are others poor? Why are there such great disparities? Their theory is seductive -- yet it ultimately fails to give much guidance as to what can be done.

The key to prosperity, in the authors' view, can be found in a nation's political and economic institutions. The operative distinction is whether these institutions are extractive or inclusive. The most successful countries will have inclusive political and economic institutions; the most desperate will be afflicted with extractive institutions. Prescriptions seem tantalizingly accessible at first: simply replace extractive institutions with inclusive ones. But this is not so easy, Acemoglu and Robinson caution.

Labeling the 'bad' institutions extractive (as opposed to the more symmetrical 'exclusive') is a nice turn of phrase. Economists use the term extractive to describe economies that exploit endowments of valued natural resources, such as oil, gold or Mr. Kurtz's ivory, that are literally extracted. But the authors intend to characterize the relationship between the elites and the masses; elites 'extract' power and wealth from human resources through oppressive political and economic institutions.

By Professor Jeffery Atik

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) reached the end of the road on July 4, when the European Parliament rejected the treaty, by a stunning vote of 39 for and 478 against (with 165 courageous MEPs abstaining). The profound reversal is all the more remarkable given that the governments of all EU member states had earlier supported ACTA (reflected in a unanimous approval of the EU Council in December 2011). Throughout, ACTA continued to enjoy the support of the EU's administrative arm, the European Commission.

ACTA was promoted as an articulation of higher IP enforcement standards by the 'like-minded' First World states (chiefly the United States, Japan and Europe) that control the greater stock of the world's valuable intellectual property. There was a wide range of objections to ACTA, but the greater concerns expressed in Europe was its potential disregard for due process and its potential inconsistency with Europe's strong privacy rights. While ACTA may ultimately come to life (upon ratification of six signatory parties), it has little practical import in the absence of European participation.