Although Internet piracy is rapidly supplanting physical piracy in many markets around the world, the production of and trade in pirated optical discs remain major problems in many regions. In recent years, some countries, such as Malaysia, the Philippines, and Romania, have made progress toward implementing controls on optical media production. Other countries still need to adopt and implement legislation or improve existing measures to combat illegal optical disc production and distribution, including China, India, Paraguay, and Thailand, which have not made sufficient progress in this area. The United States continues to urge its trading partners who face challenges of illegal optical media production to pass effective legislation to counter this problem, and to enforce existing laws and regulations aggressively.
Trademarks and Domain Name Disputes
A growing area of concern for trademark holders is the protection of their trademarks against unauthorized uses under country code top level domain name (ccTLD) extensions. U.S. rights holders risk losing valuable Internet traffic because of such uses. A related and growing concern is ccTLDs lacking transparent and predictable uniform domain name dispute resolution policies (UDRPs). Effective UDRPs should assist in quickly and efficiently resolving these disputes.
The United States encourages our trading partners to provide procedures that allow for the protection of trademarks used in domain names, and to ensure that dispute resolution procedures are available to effectively enforce against misuse of trademarks.
Government Use of Software
Under Executive Order 13103 issued in September 1998, United States Government agencies maintain procedures to ensure that they use authorized business software. Pursuant to the same directive, USTR has undertaken an initiative to work with other governments, particularly in countries that are modernizing their software asset management systems or where concerns have been raised, to stop governmental use of illegal software. Considerable progress has been made under this initiative, leading to numerous countries and territories mandating that only authorized, legitimate software may be used by government ministries. Further work on this issue remains with certain trading partners, such as China, Costa Rica, India, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, and Ukraine. The United States looks forward to these governments' adoption of effective and transparent procedures to ensure legitimate governmental use of software.
Intellectual Property and Health Policy
Numerous comments in the 2010 Special 301 review highlighted important concerns arising at the intersection of IPR policy and health policy. The 2001 WTO Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health (Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health) recognized the gravity of the public health problems afflicting many developing and least-developed countries, especially those resulting from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other
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