International Law

China As Intellectual Property Powerhouse? Someday. Maybe.

By Dan

CNN China correspondent Lara Farrar, just wrote an excellent story on China's efforts to boost its intellectual property protection so as to better enable it to become an innovation-based economy. The article is entitled, "Keeping things safe: China aims to boost its intellectual property rights," and it nicely highlights Beijing's increasing emphasis on IP and it extensively quotes CLB's own Steve Dickinson. 

It begins by noting how Beijing is seeking to move China from a manufacturing economy to an innovation economy and how this plan includes increasing annual patent filings to two million by 2015. Last year China's intellectual property office granted 815,000 patents, itself a 40% increase from the year before. 

The article then gives Steve THE call out quote: "If you don't think you are going to get sued in China, you are crazy." Steve was referring to how Chinese companies are getting increasingly aggressive at protecting their own IP and they will not hesitate to sue foreign companies they see as infringing on their intellectual property (IP). The article notes how 30,626 intellectual property rights cases were filed in China in 2009, a 25% increase from the previous year. Amazingly, all but 117 of these cases have already been resolved.

The article rightly stresses the importance of registering your IP in China because if you do not register your IP there, you have no protection there:

"If you do not register your IP (intellectual property) in China, that is the equivalent of giving your competitor a royalty free license. If you don't get a Chinese patent that means you have no right to sue.

"[The Chinese] say that if you don't come to China to file, you cannot accuse us of not respecting your own intellectual property because you don't even care to go to the Chinese patent office.

"If China is your largest market, it makes sense for you to budget the most to protect your intellectual property in that market. There is no magic to that."

In 2010, international patent filings from China totaled 13,000 applications, a 61% increase from 2009, the China Daily reported. Dickinson believes that it is only a matter of time before China's domestic courtroom battles are replicated on the international stage.

"Intellectual property is one of the main areas of litigation [in China]. They are really after each other on these issues. They for sure will start to take it overseas. There is no question. The only question is the where and how," he said.

Stan Abrams of China Hearsay concurs: "They are going to be acting like foreign companies in other markets and what do foreign companies do in those markets? They do things like enforce their patents or participate in litigation. The Chinese are going to start doing these in greater numbers."

I recommend you read the full article here.

Full post as published by China Law Blog on February 16, 2011 (boomark / email).