optical disk production capacity has migrated from Ukraine into Belarus due to lax border enforcement. We urge Belarus to implement needed legislative reforms, and enact a strong optical disk control regime before the piracy situation increases further.
BOLIVIA
Despite some early signs of progress, Bolivia made little headway in strengthening its intellectual property rights regime last year. Bolivian legislation designed to bring its IPR regime up to international standards continues to be stalled in the legislature. Enforcement activities have decreased, and allegations of corruption among judges, prosecutors and police have increased. The United States is heartened by the appointment of a new director to head the intellectual property rights service (SENAPI), and encourages Bolivia to support the director's efforts to improve the IPR situation in Bolivia. The United States looks to Bolivia to increase enforcement efforts and enact its IPR reform legislation quickly to comply with international standards.
CANADA
Canada made some progress in improving its IPR regime over the past year, including amending its patent law to provide at least a 20-year term of protection for patents filed before October 1, 1989. However, the problems that originally caused Canada to be placed on the Watch List remain largely unresolved. For example, Canada does not provide adequate data protection in the pharmaceutical area, and systematic inadequacies in Canadian administrative and judicial procedures allow early and often infringing entry of generic versions of patented medicines into the marketplace. Moreover, progress has stalled on resolving the outstanding issue of national treatment of U.S. artists in the distribution of proceeds from Canada's private copying levy and its "neighboring rights" regime. The United States is also concerned about Canada's lax, and potentially deteriorating, border measures that appear to be non-compliant with TRIPS requirements. Finally, the U.S. Government remains concerned about the potential use of compulsory licenses for Internet retransmission of broadcast signals.
CHILE
Chile's intellectual property rights laws do not appear to be fully consistent with their international obligations, and shortcomings remain in copyright and trademark enforcement. Chile has made efforts to arrest those who infringe copyrights, but attempts to enforce copyrights in Chile have met with considerable delays in the courts and weak sentences for offenders. In 2000, for instance, the legislature passed a new criminal procedure law designed to improve the old system. However, separate legislation intended to bring Chile's legal framework into compliance with TRIPS is still pending. Indeed, the bill as it stands now does not appear to provide for the effective use of injunctions in copyright and trademark infringement cases.
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