IP ISSUES IN THAILAND
I attended a breakfast briefing this morning, organised by the British Chamber of Commerce, on the subject of enforcing Intellectual Property rights in the ASEAN region.
Needless to say that laws and enforcement varies wildly from country to country but the speaker, Fabrice Mattei, gave a thoroughly entertaining and informative presentation. It's actually a subject that I need to know more about so I really enjoyed this event.
Fabrice gave on example of an incident in Thailand where a photocopy shop was selling copies of popular student books. This shop is located right across the road from Bangkok's top university. When the case came to court the judge found the shop owner had done nothing morally wrong as he was allowing Thai students to have cheaper access to their course books.
The enforcement of these kinds of infringements, and those involving DVDs and the like are way down the list in terms of importance; it's when counterfeit drugs or motor parts are involved that things become potentially life-threatening.
1 comments:
This is so true. There are a great deal of photocopy shops in Thailand, especially around college and university areas. Quite often, these shop owners copy entire text books for students and earn a lot of money from them.
I must admit that I used to frequently use this service myself during my student years in Thailand. At that time, I was not really aware there was anything wrong with it. To make this worse, many of my teachers and lecturers also used the photocopy service and sometimes they even let me and my classmates take the textbooks to the shops on our own.
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