Earlier this month, Starbucks won its copyright infringement case against Shanghai Xingbake Cafe Corp. Ltd. — surprisingly, Starbucks is the first international company to prevail under a 2001 Chinese law meant to protect well-known international trademarks. According to a report on Yahoo! Finance:

A Shanghai court ordered Shanghai Xingbake Cafe Corp. Ltd. to stop using the name Xingbake, the name used in Chinese by Starbucks Corp. “Xing”, pronounced “shing,” means “star” in Chinese, and “bake”, or “bah kuh,” sounds like “bucks”.

This news, while very encouraging (big thumbs up to judge Lu Guoqiang), is chronically overshadowed by daily reminders of blatant IP infringements, such as the photo I took this afternoon of my favorite candy bar, KitKat:

KaKes is manufactured by Hongyi Food — I couldn’t bring up the website so I don’t have much information to report back, my bad.

Anyhow, in the words of the incomperable American singer and dancer, Paula Abdul “…[we] take-two steps forward, [we] take-two steps back…”