It’s been all Google, all the time, at least in China IT/tech circles. With this week’s hearings in D.C. on the topic of Google and Net censorship, the media is in a bit of a frenzy at the moment.

As usual, the media reaction to a hot story like this includes: 1) beat the thing unmercifully until you’ve extracted every last drop of blood; and 2) try to tie the Google dispute in with as many other China stories as possible.

The problem is that there are a lot of things going on with respect to foreign companies in the China tech industry at the moment. Some of them are related or overlap, while others are wholly independent.

Case in point, a Businessweek article from Wednesday, whose headline suggests that it is a story about the foreign software industry’s travails in China. Indeed, this is what the article covers for the most part, starting off with a straightforward discussion of piracy rates (high, but lower than they used to be) and persistent problems:

That’s not good enough, says Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the BSA. The Chinese, he contends, are not maintaining their momentum on getting PC users off of illegitimate software. “We’ve really stalled on this process,” he says in an interview from Washington. Although the BSA won’t have data on the 2009 Chinese piracy rate until May, Holleyman says, anecdotal evidence suggests “we are not making further progress.” In the past, Beijing has pledged that state enterprises would use proper software, he adds. “There is nothing that I have seen or heard that suggests that commitment has been met.”

The BSA has had a good run for a few years, with successes on the government procurement front in particular. But that was relatively low-hanging fruit. Trying to get SOEs nationwide to follow these rules is a tough job, and no one should be surprised that the promises on this are not being kept, or at least not yet.

So far, so good. This is where the article runs off the rails, though.

Holleyman went to Capitol Hill on Mar. 10 to spread the word about the software industry’s impatience with China. He was a featured speaker at a hearing on Beijing’s censorship of the Internet.

Come again? The BSA certainly has more on its plate than piracy, but seguing from copyright infringement to Net censorship in one paragraph like that makes me dizzy. The only common thread here seems to be the participation of Mr. Holleyman, the BSA chief.

So now the article is about Net censorship? No, unfortunately immediately after the paragraph describing who was speaking at the House hearing (shout out to Rebecca MacKinnon!), the subject heading of the next section was “Intellectual Property Transfer?” What that has to do with copyright piracy and/or Net censorship is beyond me.

Actually, IP transfer does concern the software industry, sort of, and the article next turned towards recent problems with indigenous innovation policy, which is leading some to call foul over local IP requirements for government procurement contracts. Again, important topic, but it has nothing to do with Net censorship.

I’m not trying to single out this article, or at least not much. It’s just that with so much in the news about Google, I think it’s become very attractive to throw the subject into anything you’re writing. This article is actually about what problems the software industry is facing in China. If the author had stuck to government procurement and IP, things would have been fine.