单选题
Counterfeit
Making and selling fake copies of well-known products has been a nice little earner for crafty craftsmen over thousands of years: In Roman Gaul, unscrupulous potters would put the seals of better-known competitors on their urns so they would sell better. Until 1980s, counterfeiting was a relatively small-scale business, restricted mainly to copying luxury fashion items, such as watches and leather goods, in limited quantities. But in the 1990s, it was transformed into a much bigger, broader industry, with large-scale production and distribution of false versions of such everyday items as biscuits and shampoo. Modern technology is making it ever easier to create near-perfect copies of branded goods for a fraction of the retail price of the real thing.
By its nature, the extent of counterfeiting is hard to measure precisely, but a study by the International Chamber of Commerce reckoned that it grew from perhaps 3% of world trade in 1990 to 5% in 1995. John Pepper, chairman of Proter & Gamble, a consumer-goods multinational, says it may now be 7%～9%, or over $450 billion a year.
In some developing countries, the authorities have had, at best, an ambivalent attitude towards the booming manufacture of fake goods in their midst. After all, it creates jobs for local people and, at first sight, appears only to hurt foreign firms. Thus the richer countries whose firms are the main victims have had to use a mixture of persuasion and threats to get poorer nations to crack down on the pirates. The Uruguay round of world trade talks, which ended in 1994, resulted in agreement on the Trade Related Aspects of intellectual Property Rights (Trips), which obliges all mender countries of the World Trade Organization to impose penalties for counterfeiting and other breaches of intellectual property rights; to enforce their piracy laws adequately; and to heap firms inhibit trade in faked versions of their products.
Besides offering poorer countries trade privileges in return for a clampdown on counterfeiting, rich countries have tried convincing them that if they try harder to enforce intellectual property rights, they will win more foreign investment. But, realizing that persuasion is having little effect, they are also resorting to threats: On January 15th, America issued a warning to the Philippines, one of the world"s leading piracy centers, that it may has its trade privileges taken away unless it crack down harder on the counterfeiting gangs. But the counterfeiters are mocking his efforts: Some pirated video discs of the New James Bond film "Die Another Day", widely available on the streets, carry the taunting message "Come and catch me".