Thanks for the happy memories, Micron – now beat it, says China: Court bans chip sales The ongoing war between US-based memory maker Micron and Asian DRAM manufacturers went nuclear today. The Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court, based in southeast China, has, we're told, blocked the sale of a huge volume of Micron kit in the Middle Kingdom amid an ongoing patent row. That ruling, we understand, would stop …
The mainland regards Taiwan as part of China. A Taiwanese company going to court in China is exactly what the authorities there like to see. Why would they want to damage the Taiwanese (and by extension their own) economy? It isn't (at the moment) the Chinese who resort to bomb diplomacy.
Actually, the apostrophe in "People's Court" is correct -- just as the full name of China is indeed the "People's Republic of China" -- "people" in this case is a singular noun referring to all of the individuals in China as a unit (similar to "group" or "team"), so it takes the singular possessive form.
"Peoples" is not possessive, and "Peoples' Court" necessarily means a court for multiple nationalities, tribes or other groups of people, because people as a plural of person never has a trailing s, so "peoples'" must be the possessive plural of "people".
See http://www.dictionary.com/browse/peoples -- especially the section on usage, which touches on the possessive.
I think it's the Chinese version of the Microsoft plan:
Copy...thank you for paying us to do it.
Catchup...and thanks for educating all those scientists and engineers in the US
Overtake...we understand exactly how your system works, and as there are more of us we can do it so much better.
(I am not anti-Chinese or anti-US. I'm like a member of one of those backward tribes in the position of watching the Roman and the Persian empires battle one another and just hoping we escape the worst of the fallout.)
Is there an alternative supplier? Effectively averything made in China with the affected Micro parts is effectively on hold? Although that would mean shooting Chinese manufacturers in the foot unless there is a readily available alternate supplier. Bound to increase prices?
.. are as enforcable only as long as each country abide by some international arbitration, even when the result disadvantages that country.
China hasn't been playing that mug's game for years. So, expect the court to rule that UMC's Chinese patents are valid, have nothing whatsoever to do with silly bits of paper from the USPO, and Micron can just go home. After all, who you gonna call?
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