The ETS (Educational Testing Service) and GMAC (Graduate Management Admission Council) of the US won a trial case on the issue of copyright and trademark infringement on September 27, 2003. The case was heard in the First Appellate Court of Beijing against the New Oriental School, a private Chinese school, which was alleged to have used unauthorized TOEFL test materials and commercially exploited them without obtaining prior consent.

Because the test materials were all duly copyrighted in the US, they are also protected under applicable Chinese laws (mainly copyright law). The school was ordered by the court to pay over 10 million yuan (US$1.21 million) in compensation, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

If you have not seen the heyday of the "New Oriental Era", you will probably not understand its impact on hordes of Chinese college students who dream of going to the US. Whenever ETS releases its registration form for TOEFL, there are midnight queues for it, usually filled by parents whose child dreams of getting to the US by taking the test.

During the prime days of the New Oriental School when hundreds of thousands of Chinese college students were studying TOEFL there, the large classrooms were always packed and four suspended TVs were needed for students at the rear to see the teacher! The school, of course, made a fortune through the sale of TOEFL and GRE test materials along with class training.

But today the free lunch has come to an end. It was actually just a matter of eating first and paying later. And since the eating took place without prior permission, it certainly ended up costing more. This case is certainly encouraging for foreign copyright owners, who can now worry less about their IP being violated in China without remedy.

The principle at work is clear: copyrights and all other intellectual property rights are intricate devices designed to balance the interests of inventors or authors and end-users. But if too much protection is given to intellectual property owners, the monopoly can jeopardize the interests of the wider population.

One extreme example is the AIDS plight in developing countries such as South Africa, where the acute problem of AIDS calls for the availability of commercially accessible anti-AIDS drugs, but drug patent and daunting license fees make the drug price formidable.

The same is true with the copyright case. The difficulty, with respect to intellectual property issues, is how to strike a better balance in a situation where one man's meat is truly another's poison. Or to be more accurate, to stop the meat of the powerful being the poison of the weak.

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