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Vietnam's WTO Bid Interests Techies
by Winter Casey
While Vietnam appears poised to enter the World Trade Organization, reservations over intellectual property and market access in the southeast Asian nation still exist despite growing interest by technology companies to increase their presence in the region.
Provided the remaining approvals occur, Vietnam could become the WTO's 150th member as early as December. The Business Roundtable has voiced support for Vietnam's accession.
Colleen Ryan, a spokeswoman for the computer-maker Dell, said "the Vietnamese government is definitely taking steps to create a positive investment climate for global companies. We certainly think membership in the WTO will support those efforts."
According to the Asia Monitor, Vietnam is one of Asia's fastest-growing economies and boasted a growth rate of 8.4 percent in 2005. On Tuesday, Intel said Vietnam's leader in information technology, FPT, sold $36.5 million worth of shares in the company to Intel's venture-capital arm and the private equity firm Texas Pacific Group. Intel spokesman Tom Beermann said the move sends a strong signal that Vietnam is "an up and comer" in technology.
"We have had a strategy of trying to move computing into new markets" and "markets that previously had not benefited from high-tech," Beermann said. Vietnam is an attractive location because it has a high literacy rate and is committed to technology, he said, so it is one of the places "where we are focusing in terms of attention and investment."
Intel first moved into Vietnam in 1997 when it opened a sales headquarters. In February 2006, the company announced it would spend $300 million to build an assembly and test facility for semiconductors, Beermann said.
Former Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates visited the growing technology hub in April. Microsoft has had an office location in Vietnam since 1996.
Gail Ferrari, a spokeswoman for Unisys, said her company has just one sales office in the country. Vietnam is a possibility for expansion but not in the immediate future, she said.
Michael Schlesinger, counsel to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, said "Vietnam has taken various steps over the last couple of years to enact measures to implement laws compatible with WTO rules and the body's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPs. The question now, he said, is whether Vietnam has the will to enforce the laws to address rampant levels of piracy and take appropriate steps to open the market to all copyright-based sectors.
Schlesinger said Vietnam's current system is still "very state-controlled, and that is challenging" for the U.S. movie, recording, entertainment and software sectors. If Vietnam fails to enforce IP laws, the unauthorized use of material can be expected to increase, he said, noting that the country currently has one of the highest rates of piracy.
Schlesinger added that "all content-based industries are excited about the prospect of doing more business in Vietnam, but it is up to the Vietnamese to adequately open their markets to make that business a reality and bring the resulting benefits also to Vietnamese creators and society."
Amnesty International also noted in a report released Tuesday that people in Vietnam are scared to post information online. Amnesty said citizens in the country are harassed and imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet.
"But a growing number of brave activists are defying Internet repression and using the Internet to fight for human rights," the group said. "And the global nature of the Internet means that people all over the world can help call for greater online freedoms in Vietnam."
President Bush plans to travel to Hanoi, Vietnam, for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting Nov. 18-19.
Before that trip, the president plans to meet with Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderon on Nov. 9 to address various issues, "including ways to strengthen cooperation between the United States and Mexico, and enhance competitiveness, free trade, economic growth, and security in North America," according to the White House.
China Wants Own Mobile-Messaging Standard
China's Ministry of Information Industry is calling for the development of a homegrown standard for inputting Chinese characters for text messaging via mobile telephones, according to state media reports.
According to the Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese official said 90 percent of the Chinese character-input standards for mobile phones are copyrighted by foreign companies. Wang Lijian, secretary-general of the National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee, said the royalty fees cost China millions of dollar every year.
Gao Jingjian, head of the National Working Group on Standards of Chinese Input Technology, told Xinhua that technologies developed by foreign companies are not meeting the demands of the Chinese market.
U.S. Blamed For Most Child-Abuse Content
More than half of all reported content containing child-abuse material in the past decade appears to have come from the United States, according to information released Tuesday by a British-based Internet-monitoring group.
The Internet Watch Foundation additionally found that 20 percent of the content appeared to be hosted in Russia and 7 percent in Spain. The organization noted a "significant increase over the last 12 months in the severity of the abuse depicted on commercial child-abuse Web sites."
Most commercial sites traced and reported to authorities during the past six months have been removed, the foundation said. The group received 27,750 child-abuse reports in the last year.
Close to 80 percent of the child victims featured in the images are female, and 92 percent of abuse reports were related to Web-based content, the group said.
Microsoft Executive Discusses Computer Safety
The information technology industry should work together to provide computer safety for users, a Microsoft executive told a gathering of European IT security professionals in France on Tuesday.
"As threats continue to evolve and computing advances, we need an environment that engenders trust and accountability," said Ben Fathi, Microsoft's corporate vice president for the security technology unit. "To help protect customers and ensure the long-term success of the computing ecosystem, the industry must embrace change and innovation."
Fathi said Microsoft and the global IT security industry need to invest in continued innovation to keep pace with emerging security threats.
In other news, the U.S. government said Tuesday that it is pleased that an agreement has been reached between U.S. and European negotiators on the sharing of passenger-name records on trans-Atlantic flights. Under the agreement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection can share the data with other U.S. counter-terrorism agencies for the prevention of terrorism and other crimes.
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