Originally from:
Doing Buisness in China - Loose-leaf
Doing Buisness in China - Electronic
Preview Page - Chinese Intellectual Property Litigation —Theories and Remedies
§ 10.6.01 Intellectual Property in China
This chapter addresses damage theories and awards in Chinese
intellectual property disputes. We should emphasize that this area of
law is in significant flux, and practitioners should be sure to monitor
the latest developments in this fastest-changing area of Chinese law.
But while modern Chinese intellectual property law is in transition,
intellectual property is not new to China. Indeed, by some measures
China may be amongst the first societies to provide legal protections
for intellectual creations. Trademarks to distinguish goods existed in
China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.). And at least as early
as the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 A.D.), China required stamps or
other markings to indicate the source of pottery—both to ensure
quality and properly direct complaints. Trade names and artists’ “moral
rights” also enjoyed protection. Nevertheless, until recently China—
like Japan and South Korea before it—was largely a source of cheap
mass-produced goods for world markets. And the byproduct was
massive intellectual property violations by Chinese companies hoping
to get copied goods to Western markets.
But all of that is changing now. While the People’s Republic of
China is still poor by Western standards, it has grown remarkably since
Deng Xiaoping abandoned Communist economic policies. China now
is poised to vault from the Third World to the First.1 And with that
transition, Chinese companies are becoming producers of intellectual
property, rather than merely consumers (or copiers) of it. There were
more than 700,000 Chinese trademark applications in 2006, the highest
in the world. This is up from 173,000 in 2004 and 210,000 in 2005.
And the trend—present also in other forms of IP—shows no sign of
abating. Applications for Chinese patents by Chinese companies now
exceed applications by foreigners. And if the local businesses have
started investing in IP, it is not unreasonable to assume the intellectualproperty enforcement regime has improved enough to make such
investments worthwhile.
