Took me a couple of days to get my head around some of the issues from the meeting. My first reaction to the event was that I didn't learn all that much, but after thinking about this for a while, I realized that wasn't the point anyway.

The U.S. Ambassador's IP Roundtable really has one central goal: give industry the chance to educate the U.S. government on the most important IP issues in China and to present a wish list of things the USG can do to help. In this regard, I thought that the meeting was extremely successful.

One format criticism/observation before I get to some specifics. The event was a one-day thing yet purports to cover just about every major IP area you can think of. As you might imagine, this is a tall order. The result was a huge number of very short presentations with each speaker nervously looking at his watch and rushing through talking points. I found this to be kind of annoying, but then again, I'm not sure what a better format would look like unless they switched to two days or had multiple simultaneous panel discussions.

Because the goal of the meeting was to give a lot of folks "face time" with the USG officials, it seemed like there were always at least 10 people up on the platform at any one time as part of a panel. However, there was not enough time for all those folks to speak, nor was there sufficient time for real Q&A that allowed for meaningful dialogue amongst the panellists. Again, I don't know how to solve the problem given the political exigencies of such a meeting, but I did find the format uncomfortable compared to others I have attended.

OK, on to some specifics. I will just do a top ten list here, but note that this is not in any order of importance.

1. Transparency and data sharing – this issue cropped up many times over the course of the day and was highlighted by both industry folks and government officials. It seems that a lot of the "low-hanging fruit" of WTO-accession-era reforms have now been completed and that the USG and industry are increasingly looking towards deeper, endemic problems.

Getting Chinese government agencies to publish more information, to be more open about internal procedures, and to get them to share data with other local agencies for coordination of efforts is on the minds of a lot of people these days. There are a lot of programs, including bilateral training and exchanges, that are being implemented to move forward in this area.

As with a lot of other transparency issues in China, one gets the feeling that in many cases, the lack of sunshine does not necessarily stem from a deep desire to keep everything secret but rather inexperience with generation and publishing of different kinds of data.

2. Government resources – inadequate funding and lack of experienced personnel at Chinese government agencies was discussed many times. This is not a new problem of course, but many of the crucial problems we are facing in the industry these days (e.g. trademark pendency, weak criminal enforcement) can in many cases be attributed to staffing and other funding problems. This problem is one of the genuine bottlenecks that must be dealt with before things will get better here.

3. Effect of WTO cases filed by U.S. – there was definitely a downside to this, and the Chinese government has certainly given a cold shoulder to the U.S. on several fronts. However, there is now some disagreement as to whether this was a major or minor problem and whether bilateral discussions have returned to "normal". I've read conflicting opinions in the press, and nothing I heard at the roundtable clarified the situation for me.

4. Digital media still has a huge presence in the IP constituency – reps from the motion picture, music and software industries not only were given a voice at the roundtable, the same people appeared on multiple panels. Nothing objectionable in what they said, but why wasn't there someone there to represent manufacturers or other industries? IP is too small a community sometimes. One factoid that was news to me (I assume this was for public consumption): copyright piracy rates for software have decreased in the past three years from 90% to 80%. From horrible to merely very bad, I suppose, yeah?

5. My favorite speaker was Greg Shea of the USITO. His talk emphasized Chinese economic/innovation policy as a platform for understanding where things are going with IP legal reform and current enforcement problems. This appealed to me in particular because I love talking about the overlap between these two areas. I should note, however, that Mr. Shea was hands-down the best speaker anyway, topic notwithstanding; great cogent presentation, time constraints notwithstanding. Very impressive dude.

6. U.S. and EU have just kicked off a new multilateral initiative on copyright piracy, called ACTA. I will be posting on this topic separately.

7. Hong Kong business name issue – this is really a popular topic these days. Essentially the problem involves China infringers who set up companies in HK that incorporate famous brands in the company name. The infringer then uses that HK entity as justification to use a particular mark or domain name in China. In other words, "Hey, I'm not infringing on Rolex. My company is 'Rolex Hong Kong Co., Ltd.'"

8. Criminal enforcement – perennial favorite topic. Complaints included thresholds for criminal action and lack of resources. One comment I found interesting (I will not attribute it to anyone in particular as the meeting was officially "off the record") was a comparison between the level of funding of the criminal enforcement infrastructure in the U.S. and China. I would agree that China should be spending a lot more in this area, but comparing funding levels to the U.S. is not such a good idea given the American penchant for locking up hundreds of thousands of its own citizens and conducting a prolonged "War on Drugs" against harmless potheads. Ooops, I think my opinions are showing.

9. Anti-monopoly Law – apparently there will be IP guidelines drafted at some point in the future? This is news to me but was mentioned at the roundtable. No details were given.

10. Wish lists for USG – the number of initiatives that industry would like to see from the USG was quite long and covered a very broad spectrum. If I was Mark Cohen (IP guru at U.S. Embassy), I would have freaked out — he didn't, but then again, he is also a very impressive dude.

The only other writeup I've seen so far is on the Boulder2Beijing blog (h/t China Business Law Blog – Blogger is working today!).