This article in the Wall Street Journal illustrates the paradox that exists with doing business in China. On the one hand, their weak enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights has resulted in high piracy rates for years with numerous examples of reverse engineering cases, but on the other hand, China is a tremendous business opportunity for U.S. software vendors that cannot be ignored.
The numbers illustrate these issue:
- There are an estimated 15,000 software vendors in China
- China graduates more than 100,000 programmers each year (NPR)
- Packaged software revenues in China are expected to exceed $9B (Gartner)
Software developers and vendors should be worried about their software IP in China. Software protection or tracking usage through piracy business intelligence approaches may give vendors a way to proceed with caution when there is valuable software IP at stake.
- Vic
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