Word: miti
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Japan is fighting American software on another front. The powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) wants to see software treated as industrial property covered by patent law, which allows for only 15 years of protection. The U.S. Government argues that software is intellectual property and should be protected for up to 50 years under copyright treaties. Mill is also pushing for an arbitration system, in which software developers could be legally obliged to make certain products available to competitors if the product is considered "highly useful to the public interest." U.S. officials are extremely wary of the arbitration...
...MITI has sometimes put its money on the wrong horses. During the early 1950s, when a young company that was later to become known as Sony was getting excited about a new invention from the U.S. called the transistor, MITI chose to help two other firms engaged in making soon-to-be-obsolete vacuum tubes. MITI also had no say in Sony's decisions to market Betamax videocassette recorders and Walkman portable stereos, two of the company's fastest-selling products. Japan is the leading manufacturer of industrial robots, but MITI played no role in financing their development...
...many years, MITI has tried to keep competition within bounds. The agency generally believes that an industry functions best if it is dominated by a few big firms that can reap the benefits of large-scale production. Nonetheless, Japanese businessmen have frequently ignored MITI'S philosophy and advice. In the early 1960s, MITI tried to persuade the then ten Japanese automakers to merge into two companies: Toyota and Nissan. Only one complied, joining Nissan. Later in the decade, MITI wanted to keep Honda, the motorcycle firm, out of the auto business But Soichiro Honda, the company's legendary...
...MITI has had more success with dampening competition in declining industries. In many cases, the government has been willing to bend its antitrust laws to permit cooperation among companies. When the shipbuilding business started to sag in the 1970s, MITI allowed the firms to form a cartel that would share orders. In that way, the decline was evenly distributed. The strategy gave the companies time to diversify, while gradually reducing their production. MITI is now encouraging the formation of similar cartels in the paper, petrochemical and aluminum industries...
...Japanese attitude is quite different from what AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and other advocates of a U.S. industrial policy suggest when they call for government aid to smokestack America. While Kirkland and his allies seek to strengthen ailing industries, MITI'S goal is to shrink them slowly but steadily so that resources can be shifted to more promising fields...