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 TAIWAN

Taiwan declared 2002 an "Action Year for IPR" and considered new initiatives to improve legislation, strengthen enforcement, encourage speedy trials, and promote deterrent-level sentencing. In 2003 Taiwan took some concrete positive steps to bolster its enforcement capability, including expanding an interagency IPR task force to 220 people, and opening warehouses to store seized pirated goods and manufacturing equipment. The administration also introduced for consideration by its legislature an amended copyright law meant to strengthen protection of IPR and bring Taiwan into compliance with its obligations under the TRIPS Agreement and other international IPR standards. However, these positive steps have not produced results, and piracy and counterfeiting levels remain unacceptably high. Taiwan is one of the largest sources of pirated optical media products in the world and corporate end-user piracy and trademark counterfeiting are at high levels. U.S. companies continue to report significant problems in protecting and enforcing their IPR. Official raids are hampered by lack of expertise and poor interagency coordination; resulting penalties are neither timely nor strong enough to deter infringement. The lax protection of IPR, including lack of enforcement against piracy and trademark counterfeiting in Taiwan therefore remains a serious concern for the U.S. Government. The United States will continue our dialogue with Taiwan on the protection and enforcement of IPR during the coming year to help improve the situation.

AZERBAIJAN

Azerbaijan needs to take several remaining steps in order to fulfill its intellectual property rights commitments under the 1995 U.S.-Azerbaijan Trade Agreement. Specifically, Azerbaijan is not providing any protection to U.S. and other foreign sound recordings, and Azerbaijan does not clearly provide retroactive protection for works or sound recordings under its copyright law. In addition, there is weak enforcement of intellectual property rights in Azerbaijan. While criminal penalties for intellectual property rights violations have been adopted, there are still major shortcomings in Azerbaijan's legal regime. For instance, the provisions under the Azerbaijani Criminal Code are minimal and contain a high threshold for the imposition of criminal penalties and they do not provide ex officio authority. Moreover, they are limited to copyright and patent violations, completely excluding neighboring rights violations. The Customs Code does not appear to provide the proper authority for Customs to seize material at the border as required by the TRIPS Agreement. Lastly, it is not clear that Azerbaijan has civil ex parte search provisions as required by TRIPS.

BELARUS

Belarus needs to take several remaining steps in order to fulfill its intellectual property rights commitments under the 1993 U.S.-Belarus Trade Agreement. Enforcement of intellectual May 1, 2003