Oops, I must have remembered incorrectly, because that is a direct quote from the below article.  But, it sounds just like the wonderful things that factory owners, suppliers, and “partners” often say to my clients, many of whom need a few more years of disappointment in China before they take off the rose colored glasses and get down to brass tacks.

I have an opinion on the yuan revaluation issue and it isn’t favorable to the U.S., but that is for a different post in a different lifetime.  The picture below of Hillary and Geithner smiling with their Chinese hosts just reminded me of how clever and resilient the Chinese are in getting their way in business.  Hopefully as you read the below article you might see the same rhetoric and realize it is very similar to what they use in their business practices and it will ultimately prevent you from having to call me.  My comments are included.

China’s Hu Pledges Exchange-Rate Reform

U.S. Welcomes President’s Reference to Currency Regime as Beijing and Washington Seek Common Ground in Discussions

By ANDREW BATSON – Wall Street Journal 5-25-2010

BEIJING—Chinese President Hu Jintao opened two days of talks between U.S. and Chinese officials in Beijing by repeating a pledge to continue reform of his country’s exchange-rate regime, an assurance that was welcomed by the U.S. as the two sides sought to display common ground on contentious issues from trade and investment to nuclear proliferation.

U.S.-China Talks

Both countries have in recent months worked hard to repair a deterioration in ties, and Mr. Hu said he hoped the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue would help “build a foundation of mutual trust” between nations often at odds despite being linked by trade and large global responsibilities.

He appeared to go out of his way to address U.S. concerns about China’s tightly controlled currency, saying toward the end of his speech that “China will continue to steadily push forward reform of the renminbi exchange-rate formation mechanism in a self-initiated, controllable and gradual manner.”

Mr. Hu’s comment repeated word for word China’s standard language on the issue, but his mention of the exchange rate—which many U.S. lawmakers think China keeps unfairly low to support its exports—stood out in a speech that was otherwise long on generalities and short on specifics. Watch out for generalities and non specificity.  That’s why we have contracts. For instance, Mr. Hu didn’t mention international tensions with Iran or North Korea, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had singled out earlier as areas where the U.S. and China need to cooperate diplomatically.

This is the one I’m talking about.

The U.S. responded positively to Mr. Hu’s comments, continuing its recent efforts to keep the dispute over the currency from poisoning the broader relationship between the two countries. “We welcome the fact that China’s leaders have recognized that reform of the exchange rate is an important part of their broader reform agenda,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a speech after Mr. Hu’s remarks.  But what did it get you?

I think you can see in this picture that he knows he didn’t get anything and has to go back on the same plane with Hillary and then explain to the President how he once again was stonewalled by the Chinese, while Hillary is still happy because her and Bill have become incredibly rich since leaving the White House.

Both sides notably refrained from lecturing or sharp demands during their public comments Monday, and were careful to put their disputes in the context of an economic relationship they said has become a crucial anchor of the global economy. “Our two economies have become inseparable,” said Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan.

Trade is a main focus of the U.S.-China talks, with each side seeking assurances that the other’s market will remain open. Mr. Wang said China wants to see steps by the U.S. to improve treatment of Chinese companies investing in the U.S., and to treat China as a “market economy” in trade law, which would raise the burden of proof in antidumping cases and other trade remedies sought by U.S. companies.

U.S. companies are also increasingly concerned about the business environment in China.  In fact, they are concerned that a revaluation of the yuan will drive prices higher and lower their profit margins because they can’t raise prices in a deflationary economy. In an interview on Monday, Thomas J. Donohue, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that the members of his Washington-based organization haven’t been so concerned about China “backtracking” on opening its economy since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001—a shift that he said had made them less willing to push back against Congressional moves to restrict trade with China.

Many observers think the debt crisis in Europe and the ensuing swings in financial markets have made it less likely that China will move off its de facto peg anytime soon.  U.S. officials have said they didn’t plan to publicly push China on the currency at this week’s talks, in part because they feel such pressure would be ineffective.  Pressure is effective when you have the upper hand in negotiations.  For most of you, that is a purchase order and having other factories or suppliers on hand that can supply the same product. In a research report Monday, analysts at Standard Chartered said they now think China won’t move away from the peg until the third quarter of this year.

Mr. Wang, the vice premier, said the European debt crisis had “brought many uncertainties to the slowly recovering world economy.” Central-bank Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan briefed reporters Monday about financial issues raised in the dialogue, but didn’t directly answer a question about whether the events in Europe would affect China’s plans on its currency the yuan. “Some issues were not discussed in detail,” Mr. Zhou said.

—James T. Areddy, Aaron Back and Ian Talley contributed to this article.

So, I was thinking about horns in China and for those of you who have been here, you know that horns are not used in the same way as they are in the West.  In fact, if someone beeped their horn in the same angry, prolonged, and aggressive way as they do here in China, in Los Angles, they would most certainly be shot.  They don’t just give you a friendly toot to remind you that the light is now green, they lay on the mother like their life depended upon it which then starts a chain reaction of angry beepers all laying on the loudest horns on the planet.

I’m sure that when they design and build cars in China for sale on the Domestic market, whether it’s Ford, or Mercedes, or BMW, or Geely, they have a meeting to discuss horns and there is a typical Chinese automotive engineer type with the short sleeve white shirt, black pants with white socks and overly shiny black shoes that says:  ”we gotta make these horns extra loud so that they Chinese will hear them.”  The response inevitably is “how much louder” and the engineer says “what about 100% louder, because we are China and the Middle Kingdom and the biggest and best country in the world and we should have the loudest horns.”  The decision makers obviously not wanting to lose their jobs by allowing wimpy horns or lose face to the rest of the automotive industry all agree and the horn blowing torture on Old Chinatex begins.

So I was thinking, as they create their own traffic jams by all trying to jump ahead of each other on the roads, why the Chinese don’t just wait for the light to change, or the person rudely stopped in the middle of the road talking on their cell phone to move on, or the taxi letting off it’s passengers to complete their transaction (which usually only takes about 10 seconds), or any of the million other reasons why they beep their horns, “why do they really lay on the horn”.  It doesn’t seem that it works or the person whom is the brunt of the horn blowing cares, it only annoys the hell out of me.  I am sitting in my office on the 12th floor of a premier office building in the Shenzhen CBD and I hear a cacophony of the loudest horns ever invented and the same goes for my apartment on the 32nd floor.  Mosquitoes don’t even make it up to the 32nd floor, how the hell can the horns sound so loud and reach my ears while I am trying to sleep.  I guess the simple answer is they just don’t give a hoot about anything else other than what is impacting their little world at that time and I wholeheartedly believe that this mentality is prevalent in everything they do.  Now I am not talking about everyone, of course there are considerate and inconsiderate people all over the world, it just seems like with one and a half billion people that there are plenty here that just don’t give a hoot.

So just remember, when you are dealing with a factory owner or looking to invest in or acquire an existing business or conducting any other transaction and you believe that the person(s) you are dealing with “likes you” and “I can trust them” (Old Chinatex has heard it all) the way they lay on that horn.

As always, Yeeha!!  Chinatex

Fake goods in mail up 7-fold

By WANG YAN (China Daily) Updated: 2010-04-20 08:24

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/20/content_9750480.htm

Drastic increase due to rapid development of e-business: Customs

On July 20, 2009, Beijing Customs stopped a batch of outbound express mail for random inspection.

Each of the 75 boxes, with “digital accessories and parts, digital cassettes and electronic accessories” written on them, weighed 30 kg. The parcels were headed to 10 countries.

On opening the boxes, officers found more than 50,000 mobile phones, SD cards, flash drives and memory banks involving 12 brand names.

The smuggling bid opened the customs department’s eyes to the seriousness of the infringement of intellectual property rights in the country.

The case is now been transferred to the public security department for further investigation.

The drastic increase in the practice is due to the development of e-business, said Meng Yang, director of the policy and regulations department of GAC, at a press conference in Beijing.

“Intellectual property protection in export trade faces new threats as e-business develops. With online trading gaining popularity, we’re seeing more and more cases where tort goods are shipped through mail, express mail, or carried by individual passengers across the border,” Meng said.

But she said the department would not regard it as an infringement of property rights if tort goods carried by passengers were within “range of reasonable self-use”.

Zhao Fudi, spokesperson for the GAC, said mails and express mails had become a major channel in the cross-border circulation of tort goods. Zhao said the GAC launched a special campaign from July to December last year, where inspection was focused on mail and express mail.

“The number of batches of goods seized through mails and express mail in 2009 has jumped by 738 percent compared with 2008. “The number of items has increased by 28 percent, and the total value by 402 percent,” he said. China’s e-business transactions reached 530 million yuan ($77.6 million) in 2009, an annual increase of 248.7 percent, iResearch said in its report on Thursday.

It said China’s e-business market is stepping into an explosively increasing stage. “In the next two to three years, the country’s e-business customers will maintain an annual growth rate of 70 percent. Scales of real goods will reach an annual increase of up to 400 percent,” the report said.

According to the GAC data, a total of 280 million items were seized last year because of intellectual property infringement, where 99.9 percent were exporting goods and 99 percent were trademark infringement. Tobacco products, light industrial products, cosmetic and care products, hardware and mechanical products, and clothes topped the list of goods categories in terms of the number of items seized in 2009. Among the five, only tobacco products saw a decrease in number compared with last year, from 560 million in 2008 to 180 million in 2009.

I have had several clients recently tell me that their lawyer from _______ (insert the country here cause they are all the same) told them that there “wasn’t any need to file a trademark or patent application in China because China doesn’t recognize intellectual property rights anyway and people still ride around on bicycles wearing those green army suits and hats” (I added that part).  This is a big misconception that could potentially cost someone a lot of money.

First of all, China has something called the State Intellectual Property  Office of the Peoples Republic of China “SIPO”.  They even have a website if you want to pay them a visit:  http://www.sipo.gov.cn and if you can read Chinese you would understand what they are saying.  If you can’t read Chinese, they have an English version at:  http://www.sipo.gov.cn/sipo_English/ From the website you can see they are legitimate, SIPO is similar to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and takes Intellectual Property filing and enforcement very seriously.

Secondly, as more Chinese companies file for IP protection in China and in the West, and they have an expectation of enforcement and a rule of law, those same principles will extend to foreign companies and individuals who apply for IP protection in China.  I have personally watched IP filing and protection improve dramatically in the past 7 years and most of the problems in enforcing intellectual property rights arise when foreign companies have not filed in China.

Thirdly,  China does not recognize US and other patents in the same way as other countries.  China recognizes Chinese patents filed with the SIPO and China is a first to file jurisdiction.  This means the first person to file usually gets the IP rights.  I say usually because there are circumstances where internationally recognized brands have spent a lot of money to enforce their trademark rights from people who have filed first in China or similarly they have spent a lot of money to buy the rights from those same clever individuals who filed first.

Finally, filing Trademark and Patent applications in China is relatively straight forward and not prohibitively expensive.  In fact, the costs compare with those in the U.S. and are lower than in the E.U.  When filed and approved by the SIPO you then have Intellectual Property rights and an asset in the IP that you didn’t have in China previous to filing.  The certificate then allows you to use expanding legal channels to enforce your IP.

So, why wouldn’t you file!!!!  Because your lawyer, who has never been to China, told you it wouldn’t make a difference.  While Old Chinatex doesn’t make a bunch of money on helping clients file Trademarks and Patents in China, it is a service we offer because we simply wouldn’t be doing everything we can to help our clients navigate the business jungle in China – if we didn’t.

For more information on Intellectual Property protection in China please contact Chinatex or his staff at info@chntxlaw.com

As always, yeeha!  Chinatex

Yesterday, I was honored to be invited to witness the launching of my friend Jame Guo’s new line of sailing yachts.  Jame, a veteran of the components business and former resident of the city that claims to never sleep, was looking to have a sailboat made a few years ago.  He went all through China looking at the supposedly best and most well funded shipyards and found an opportunity.  While overseas joint ventures were bleeding money and producing substandard quality and local shipyards were just not experienced enough to handle the larger boats, Jame decided to build one by himself.  Necessity it seems is still the mother of invention and in the sailing yacht business in China Jame Guo is the father.  After a painful and hard working year spent in a small trailer outside of his factory, Jame launched the first Farnova 48′ yesterday.  Picked it right up off the pier and carefully craned it into the waters of the South China sea.  Chinese style with champagne and fireworks and a large crew of workers intent on protecting the hull from being pushed into the sea wall.  So, here is a man who has been very successful in electronic components, he didn’t need to spend a year in a trailer and struggle with things like redesigning (and building) the below deck interior more than 4 times – until he got it right.  He could of retired and invested his money in U.S treasuries (maybe not) and sailed off into the sunset.  But, Jame like so many entrepreneurs in China, are driving the recovery in Asia and doing exactly what we used to do in the west.  Invent, innovate, build and take calculated risks.  Jame’s new Farnova 48′ is a beautiful and well made cruising sailboat and he has a dozen more lined up in his factory waiting to set sail.  For more info you can check out his website: http://www.teammarine.cn/

I cannot explain how exciting it was to watch this man and his team realize a hard fought dream.  I have seen teams win championships in different sports and many other similar successes but few have been as rewarding for me as joining Jame yesterday at the boat launch.  As we countdown the days until Chinese New Year, one thing is certain – China will take a break to breath and relax and then afterwards hold on world because they are going to come out of the gates roaring in the year of the Tiger.  As always, yeeha!!  Chinatex

The Chinese have a traditional way of greeting each other.  They say “chi fan le mei you?”  This means, “have you eaten?”  They also say hello and how are you and long time no see and stuff like that, but, the traditional way to greet someone is by asking if they have eaten yet.  This is unusual to say the least and often misunderstood by foreigners in China.  There are many theories of where the greeting began and i won’t go into those – the most important thing is to understand how important eating is in the Chinese culture and psyche.

Many years ago, when i had been here for about a year and thought i knew a lot about China, i was driving through a district of Shenzhen (a city with 12 million + people) and it came to me why eating was everything in China.  It was about noon and we were weaving our way through the throngs of people leaving their offices/factories, and the cars, taxi’s, buses, three wheeled gasoline powered tricycle things, and every other contraption known to mankind.  Now, i wasn’t driving but i was in the passenger seat and my driver was in 5th gear going 30km per hour and the car was shaking and i kept wanting to reach over and down shift for him but i refrained and gritted my teeth until they started to disintegrate.  It didn’t help that i hadn’t had anything to eat since that awful cup of Chinese hotel coffee and greasy fried bread stick that i had earlier that morning.   So, i tried to get into that Zen state that has gotten me through some of the most uncomfortable situations and i looked out the window at the chaos that was unfolding around me.

Right when i was concentrating on my breathing, i looked down the road and thought i saw what looked like a buck naked cave man eating a coconut.  ”I have taken this Zen thing to a completely new level” i thought to myself and looked away.  ”Can’t be a naked cave man, surely someone would have taken him away or thrown a shawl around him or given him a fig leaf.”  I looked back in the same direction just to see if i might have not imagined this and there he was, a completely naked cave man eating a coconut.  He looked exactly like Tom Hanks in that movie where he is stranded on the island with the volleyball – not the fat Tom Hanks but the one after he had been there for a few years.  As we approached, he was on the area that in most countries would be a sidewalk, but in China is actually a labyrinth of open manholes, electric scooters carrying propane, rickshaws loaded down with styrofoam, dangling high tension wires and an assortment of other wonders and dangers. He was indeed naked and brown, obviously from not wearing any clothes, and his hair was matted and dreadlocked, obviously from not having a haircut, and he was eating what looked like a coconut or some other thing with a hemplike exterior.  Now in Borneo or Sumatra i wouldn’t have been surprised to see this phenomenon, but in Shenzhen China at noon on a busy work day – i was shocked.

The cave man walked through the crowd and no one even paid any attention to him.  He just leisurely strolled along and the Chinese purposefully moved on their way to somewhere without noticing him.  I wondered what they were thinking: “naked man – hmm”", “naked man – gotta get back to work”, “naked mand – time to eat”,  ”that coconut looks good – i’m hungry”, “what’s a cave man?”.  I asked the driver about the man and he said, “what naked man?”  I said, “that one right there in front of the car” and he said oh, and i’ll never forget what he said next and you shouldn’t either because it’s the moral of this story, he said “where do you want to eat?”  Well, i was hungry and i have been to many of the big cities in the world, but i have never seen a naked cave man walking down the street eating a coconut and i just couldn’t think about food right now.  I said, “that man is naked, don’t the police or someone come to take him away?”  He responded, “maybe he is crazy, now do you want Chinese food or McDonalds?”

I couldn’t let it go that quickly so i called a Chinese friend and told him what i had just seen, he said “he’s probably crazy, do you want to eat hotpot tonight?”  Unbelievable is all i could think and i said i would think about it and call him later.  We had passed the cave man and were rolling along in 5th gear when it hit me.  They are obsessed with eating.  Now i don’t know where it came from and don’t really concern myself with the roots of their hunger obsession, but i just then realized that eating consumes their mind and probably gets in the way of otherwise productive thought.

Having been in China for 7 years, it’s no longer a surprise to me when someone asks “have you eaten?”  I now respond with a yes or no and ask them if they have eaten.  I like to eat, especially big old Texas hamburgers and a good pizza and even some Chinese food, but it doesn’t consume most of my waking thoughts.  So i started to think about other things like productivity and creativity and rationality and how they apply in China and i keep coming back to the cave man and the people around him that were singly focused on something other than his being naked walking down the city street.  It has to be food.  They are always thinking about food.

I haven’t done any research with focus groups or control groups or any groups for that matter, but i have looked around and observed and i have reached the non scientific conclusion that the Chinese are more concerned about eating than anything else.  Even their obsession with money and saving face and smoking is far outweighed by eating.  For those of us China veterans we know that trying to accomplish anything from 11:00 a.m. until 2 is next to impossible.  I have even suggested that if anyone thinks about attacking China, they ought to do it during lunch because the Chinese will probably think, “look at that we are being attacked and overrun by aliens, where do you want to eat?”  Note to aliens, I have given you this pearl of wisdom without sending you a bill, please wait until i am out of the country.

So, if you are thinking about doing business in this huge and burgeoning market or have done business here for years, you should understand the customs and psyche of the people who are and control this market.  While they can do good work and are industrious and hard working and entrepreneurial and lots of other things that i won’t mention here, they are often distracted by some genetically coded obsession with eating.  Plan your meetings accordingly, schedule factory/supplier/partner meetings first thing in the morning or mid afternoon (after they have eaten and slept).   Bring candy and pass it out if you see their blood sugar meters dropping into the “your head looks like a bowl of noodles” zone.  Don’t get frustrated, instead try and understand the things that make them tick and adapt to their ways, which you will never change in 5,000 years and i believe you will be more successful in doing business in China.

You won’t believe this part, but several weeks later we were driving through a completely different district in Shenzhen and i had reached another conclusion that the other gears didn’t actually work and that’s why we were in 5th all the time and who did we see – yes, the caveman.  Naked as a newborn (with brown skin and pubic hair and dreadlocks) and this time he was eating a banana!  A banana!!  Even Hollywood couldn’t script this.  Scene 2. Naked cave man walking down the street in Borneo, no let’s make it Shenzhen and he’s eating dumplings or noodles, no a banana this way it looks like he pulled it right off the tree.  You’d think i wouldn’t be shocked but i was and i got excited and said to the driver, “look at that naked man he is the same one we saw two weeks ago isn’t he?”  He said, “what naked man, we never saw a naked man………… are you hungry, where do you want to eat?”

As always, yee ha!!  Chinatex

That brings me to the point of this blawg post.  Old Chinatex tried his hand at Badminton tonight and boy was it an awakening.  I was going to write about one of my favorite subjects which is the hiring of chinese/taiwanese/hong kong managers by western companies and the company executive management trusting them to give legal advice just because they studied somewhere in the U.S. or the U.K. and speak good English.  I realized that i didn’t need to waste my time when Old Dan Harris over at Harris & Moure took the words right out of Old Chinatex’s mind and posted it on his award winning China Law Blog.  This gave me some time to try my hand at badmitten. Here is the link to the blog post.http://www.chinalawblog.com/2009/11/first_lets_kill_all_the_nonchi.html

Now back to badmitten!  I now have an acute understanding why the Chinese are infatuated with this game.  If you have ever watched them play it seems they get an inordinate amount of joy out of smashing that little birdie.  I’m talking really smashing it and they get even more joy when their opponent or just the other person smashing it back to them, misses it.  I can only imagine that they are thinking about their boss or husband or coworker or professor or who knows when they take aim at that little rubber head on the birdie and give it a resounding whack.  So, tonight i played and thought about the rude taxi drivers, the clients who don’t listen to me and hire crooked managers anyway and say “but i trust him, he went to the University of Wisconsin”, and the bad service at restaurants and the noisy people in the elevators talking on their cell phones and a plethora of other unmentionables.  Every time i took a swipe at that little birdie i imagined one of their faces – now i know why it is their national sport.  With 1.6 billion of them, they have to take their frustrations out on something and those poor little birdies are the perfect foils for their anger.

So, if you hire a manager who went to the University of Wisconsin or some other school and professes to be an expert on China and international law and you trust him and then later you realize that Dan Harris and Old Chinatex were right, i suggest you take up Badmitten.  As always, yeeha!!  Chinatex

Google violating copyrights, authors say

By Xie Yu (China Daily) Updated: 2009-10-21 07:49

Search engine giant Google is facing accusations that its employees, illegally and without permission, scanned Chinese writers’ works into its digital library, Google Books.

“Google’s infringement to Chinese authors is very severe,” said Zhang Hongbo, deputy director-general of China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS), the only domestic administration of written works copyrights.

Chinese government departments, such as the National Copyright Administration, will push the US government to handle the issue properly, considering Google is such a major force in the online world and has acted arbitrarily in this issue, he said. According to a rough estimate from CWWCS, nearly 18,000 books from 570 Chinese writers have been scanned by Google and included in its digital library, which is only open to netizens within the US borders. This was done without informing or paying most of the writers.

“So far, no writer we reached said he or she has authorized Google to do the scanning,” Zhang said. Google has not yet replied to the accusation. Its spokesman was not available for comment yesterday. Hmm, no authorization and nobody available to reply to the accusations. Looks like Google is learning from the Chinese.

Google has been scanning millions of books under US copyright since 2004. Under a tentative settlement with US authors and publishers, that will cover all books unless the copyright holders object. Google is in the final stages of reaching a settlement with two US copyright organizations, which brought copyright infringement lawsuits against the search company for its book-scanning project.

A US court has given the parties until early next month to revise their current settlement agreement and ensure its compliance with antitrust and copyright laws. According to the settlement offered by Google, authors who accept Google’s scan could get $60 per book as compensation, as well as 63 percent of the income from online reading. Readers of the books online would pay a fee for digital access to the book.

According to the settlement, if the author rejects Google’s right to scan, he or she should appeal before Jan 5, 2010. Authors should approach Google authorizing the scanning and get the compensation before June 5, 2010. But Zhang said this settlement is not acceptable to Chinese writers. Of course it’s not acceptable to Chinese writers.

“First of all, Google violated Chinese writers’ copyright. Actually this is a difficult issue and one for the lawyers to work out. Did Google violate Chinese copyright? It doesn’t make sense for them to set a deadline for Chinese writers to protect their interests. “Secondly, the company should show a clear attitude to admitting its infringement and then negotiate with Chinese authors sincerely,” he said.

The US often criticizes China’s inefficiency in protecting property rights, Zhang said. Indeed they do.

“But you see what their company is doing in China? Many of our writers are infuriated,” Zhang said. Zhang Kangkang, a prominent writer and also vice-president of the Chinese Writers’ Association, said she was “surprised” and “angry” at Google’s copyright infringement. “It’s one-sided agreement to scan the work without permission from the author. It is illegal to enjoy the writer’s work in the name of knowledge sharing,” said Zhang, whose books have been scanned by Google.

Chen Cun, another well-known Chinese writer who lives in Shanghai, said Google is “day-dreaming” if it wants to buy copyright from him for $60. “The price should be set by both sides. It is impossible to buy an object with your bid only,” he said. I love it when I hear Chinese speaking in reasonable business terminology and standards that we have been playing by for years. Yes Google is daydreaming and this could turn into a nightmare although Google has probably performed a financial risk assessment and made a strategic decision to violate copyright and sort it all out later. $60 dollars, you have got to be kidding!!

Google Books is planning to turn millions of books into electronic literature available online.

Google’s head of Print Content Partnerships in Britain, Santiago de la Mora, earlier said that Google is solving one of the big problems in the print world – that some books are pretty much dead in the sense that hard copies can no longer be found. “We’re bringing these books back to life, making them more visible to 1.8 billion Internet users in a very controlled way,” de la Mora said. Thank goodness for Google bringing these dead books back to life – perhaps they should be awarded the Nobel Prize. However, Google Books is facing big legal problems in the US, Europe and elsewhere around the globe over the issue of copyrights.