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 piracy within its borders. U.S. industry continues to raise concerns about the overall environment for production, sale, and export of a wide range of infringing products and the impunity accorded well-connected figures involved in infringement. Optical media piracy, including business and entertainment software, and increasing production and export of pirate CDs remains a particularly acute problem. Signal theft/cable piracy continues to be widespread. The United States urges Thailand to continue to strengthen its IPR regime and will provide Thailand with specific recommendations on judicial, legislative/regulatory,and enforcement issues. Key among these will be swift enactment of a strong optical media bill in the near term, which will help ensure the effectiveness of Thailand's stepped-up enforcement efforts concerning piracy counterfeiting.

TURKEY

Although there has been some positive movement concerning protection of copyrights in Turkey, the situation regarding data exclusivity shows little sign of improvement. Turkey still has not adopted any administrative or legal mechanism to protect proprietary commercial data and lags far behind other EU aspirant countries in its protection of commercially valuable data for pharmaceuticals. With respect to trademarks, U.S. companies complain that Turkey has become a source of significant counterfeit production for the domestic market and export to Western Europe. On the copyright front, the judiciary's failure to treat piracy as a serious criminal matter and continued procedural hurdles in enforcing copyright owners' rights make for a mixed record overall. Although the Ministry of Culture has taken some positive steps to thwart copyright infringement regarding DVDs and other optical media products, serious problems still remain. In order to facilitate adequate protection of copyrighted materials, Turkey's judiciary needs to hand down deterrent penalties for intellectual property infringement, and customs needs to make greater efforts to tighten border controls.

TURKMENISTAN

Turkmenistan needs to take several remaining steps in order to fulfill its intellectual property rights commitments under the 1993 U.S.-Turkmenistan Trade Agreement. Specifically, Turkmenistan is not yet a party to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistics Works (Berne Convention) or the Geneva Phonograms Convention. Turkmenistan is not providing any protection to U.S. and other foreign sound recordings, nor does it clearly provide retroactive protection for works or sound recordings under its Copyright Law. In addition, criminal penalties for intellectual property rights violations have yet to be adopted as required by the U.S.-Turkmenistan Trade Agreement. Furthermore, the Customs Code does not provide the proper authority to seize material at the border, as is necessary to conduct effective border enforcement.

URUGUAY

In 2002 Uruguay amended its 65-year old copyright law. The new amendments entered into effect in January 2003 and represent an improvement over the prior 1937 Law and contain many May 1, 2003