Alibaba will increase counterfeit merchandise in global circulation if the company succeeds in plans to expand its platform and generate more sales, said Juanita Duggan, CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, in a July 17 letter to Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba (here). AAFA and Alibaba have ramped up collaboration over the past year, but that hasn't yielded a “meaningful outcome,” said Duggan.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative removed Paraguay from its 2015 Special 301 Watch List after the U.S. signed an intellectual property rights (IPR) agreement with the country Thursday, USTR said in a statement. The agency plans an out-of-cycle review of Paraguay in the near future, the statement said. USTR released its most recent edition of the Special 301 Report in late April (see 1505010009). Paraguay has "stepped up its efforts to strengthen IPR protection and enforcement" over the past 18 months, said USTR.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative removed Paraguay from its 2015 Special 301 Watch List after the U.S. signed an intellectual property rights (IPR) agreement with the country Thursday, USTR said in a statement. The agency plans an out-of-cycle review of Paraguay in the near future, the statement said. USTR released its most recent edition of the Special 301 Report in late April (see 1505010009). Paraguay has "stepped up its efforts to strengthen IPR protection and enforcement" over the past 18 months, said USTR.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative removed Paraguay from its 2015 Special 301 Watch List after the U.S. signed an intellectual property rights (IPR) agreement with the country Thursday, USTR said in a statement. The agency plans an out-of-cycle review of Paraguay in the near future, the statement said. USTR released its most recent edition of the Special 301 Report in late April (see 1505010009). Paraguay has "stepped up its efforts to strengthen IPR protection and enforcement" over the past 18 months, said USTR.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative removed Paraguay from its 2015 Special 301 Watch List after the U.S. signed an intellectual property rights agreement with the country on June 18, USTR said in a statement (here). The agency plans to conduct an out-of-cycle review on the country in the near future, the statement said. USTR released its most recent edition of the Special 301 report in late April (see 1505010009). Paraguay has "stepped up its efforts to strengthen IPR protection and enforcement" over the past 18 months, said USTR.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s 2015 Special 301 Report “is another one-sided and harmful missive to the rest of the world that names and shames countries for not mirroring, or even exceeding, the United States’ restrictive copyright rules,” said Electronic Frontier Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm and Global Policy Analyst Maira Sutton in a blog post Thursday. The report, released Thursday, said USTR kept China and India among the 13 countries on its priority watch list for copyright and other IP rights violations. USTR had elevated Ecuador and Kuwait to the priority watch list since it published its 2014 report (see 1504300061). The 2015 report places a high importance on trade secret protections as criteria for criticizing other countries’ IP rights practices, with the USTR never specifically defining what it considers a trade secret protection. That means the term “can encompass a wide range of information that it encourages nations to protect with heavy-handed enforcement,” EFF said. The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s most recent draft IP language is “dangerously broad,” and if “this is the kind of language that the USTR holds as a minimum standard for enforcement, we should expect to see the agency to increasingly push for draconian rules that would threaten critical reporting published online,” EFF said. The 2015 report also includes a renewed emphasis on domain name disputes, calling on countries to protect U.S. trademarks.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s 2015 Special 301 Report “is another one-sided and harmful missive to the rest of the world that names and shames countries for not mirroring, or even exceeding, the United States’ restrictive copyright rules,” said Electronic Frontier Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm and Global Policy Analyst Maira Sutton in a blog post Thursday. The report, released Thursday, said USTR kept China and India among the 13 countries on its priority watch list for copyright and other IP rights violations. USTR had elevated Ecuador and Kuwait to the priority watch list since it published its 2014 report (see 1504300061). The 2015 report places a high importance on trade secret protections as criteria for criticizing other countries’ IP rights practices, with the USTR never specifically defining what it considers a trade secret protection. That means the term “can encompass a wide range of information that it encourages nations to protect with heavy-handed enforcement,” EFF said. The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s most recent draft IP language is “dangerously broad,” and if “this is the kind of language that the USTR holds as a minimum standard for enforcement, we should expect to see the agency to increasingly push for draconian rules that would threaten critical reporting published online,” EFF said. The 2015 report also includes a renewed emphasis on domain name disputes, calling on countries to protect U.S. trademarks.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s 2015 Special 301 Report “is another one-sided and harmful missive to the rest of the world that names and shames countries for not mirroring, or even exceeding, the United States’ restrictive copyright rules,” said Electronic Frontier Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm and Global Policy Analyst Maira Sutton in a blog post Thursday. The report, released Thursday, said USTR kept China and India among the 13 countries on its priority watch list for copyright and other IP rights violations. USTR had elevated Ecuador and Kuwait to the priority watch list since it published its 2014 report (see 1504300061). The 2015 report places a high importance on trade secret protections as criteria for criticizing other countries’ IP rights practices, with the USTR never specifically defining what it considers a trade secret protection. That means the term “can encompass a wide range of information that it encourages nations to protect with heavy-handed enforcement,” EFF said. The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s most recent draft IP language is “dangerously broad,” and if “this is the kind of language that the USTR holds as a minimum standard for enforcement, we should expect to see the agency to increasingly push for draconian rules that would threaten critical reporting published online,” EFF said. The 2015 report also includes a renewed emphasis on domain name disputes, calling on countries to protect U.S. trademarks.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative called out a range of countries for intellectual property rights violations on April 30 in its Special 301 Report . China and India were named to USTR’s Priority Watch List, the group of countries that host the largest-scale IP infringement. The 2014 Special 301 Report established an out-of-cycle review for India, and the agency later declined to label India a Priority Foreign Country, the most severe USTR classification for IP violations (see 1410140100).

China and India will remain among the 13 countries on the U.S. Trade Representative’s priority watch list this year for copyright and other IP rights violations, the USTR office said Thursday in its annual special 301 report. China and India have improved their IP policies, but other new policies have become a cause for concern, said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Holleyman on a conference call with reporters. Other nations on the priority watch list are Algeria, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela. The report placed another 24 countries on the USTR’s lower-tier watch list: Barbados, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Guatemala, Jamaica, Lebanon, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Romania, Tajikistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The 2014 special 301 report included 10 countries on the priority watch list and 27 on the regular watch list (see 1405020082).